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Michael Black[_2_] · July 2nd 13, 12:13 AM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

On Mon, 1 Jul 2013, wrote:

My restored, aligned GPR-90 is coming home tomorrow - excite to try the
beast on my long wire antenna! Will report later, maybe post a video.

I paid $20 for mine at a garage sale last August. I didn't get out to the
garage sales early, so by the 1pm or so I expected to find little. I turn
down a street where a sale had been advertised, and a couple of houses
away I could see a shortwave receiver, I couldn't tell what brand or
model, but clearly it was a classic. I get close, it's a TMC GPR-90. I
figure it will be way over my price range, but I ask and they say "$20".
I say "I expected three or four hundred" and they still said "$20". It
was too good a price to ignore. So I haul it home on foot and bus, the
other plans for the day cancelled.

And it sits there, other things in the way. The rectifier tube is loose
in the base, so I have dig out that box of tubes and hope I have one. And
the fuseholder is missing, the piece that screws in with the fuse. That
may have come off on the trip home. So until I find those pieces, it's
not even getting turned on.

I don't know if it will need much work. Physically it's in great shape,
maybe a bit of rust on the bottom. No case, but that doesn't bother me.

I assune that if I'd not come along at that point, it would have been
tossed. There have been garage sales at that house before, but this time
it was younger people, relatively so, and I guess they were the kids
clearing out the hosue. When I did a search when I got home, I found an
earlier ad from the same area offering a GPR-90, so it had to be them.
They tried at $100 and had no luck, so I was the last call I suspect.

I've been going to garage sales since about 1990. And I never saw
shortwave receivers until one rummage sale in 2006, a Grundig Satellite
500. I find one about every year now, some just average analog portables
with a band or two, but some digitally tuned and fairly high grade, and I
pay almost nothing. I even got a Grundig mini 300 for 2.00, right after
getting a Sony SW-1 for ten dollars. The mini is an odd thing, single
conversion and analog tuning, and not a great receiver, but it has a
frequency counter so no need to fuss with dials. By making it extremely
complicated, the unit becomes much simpler. It's probably as bad as my
hallicracters S-120A I got in 1971, except with the frequency counter
dial, I can actually tune to a specific frequency. The GPR-90 is the only
tube receiver in the bunch. I would have expected to find a cheap
receiver like the Hallicrafters S-38 or even a Radio Shack DX-150 long
before finding a GPR-90.

Michael

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