On Tue, 18 Mar 2014, sctvguy1 wrote:

On Tue, 18 Mar 2014 14:00:53 -0400, Michael Black wrote:


I don't think any of that would have helped my Hallicrafters S-120A (the
transistor model), that thing didn't need an antenna to receive endless
local broadcast stations. It would have needed a lot of work with
shielding to make a filter between the antenna and receiver useful, it
wsa just picking up the signals directly.

That was my first receiver, my Mother got it from Sears for about $70.
That model was terrible, it looked cool, but it was a real dog. I
finally got an older Hallicrafters, SX-40 I think, and it was much better.

I emptied out my bank account of accumulated birthday and Christmas money,
and some other money was added. It was more like $90 Canadian, which was
a lot for me at the time, but the cheapest receiver I could get locally,
and probably the cheapest I could get generally.

How many people were suckered in by those low end receivers? We had no
experience, and as you say, it all looked so good. The dial was awful,
but hey, it had all those places around the world stencilled, I could get
Antarctica if I tuned to that spot there. I was still a beginner, so how
would I know about seeking out a local ham club to see if I could at least
find the same level of receiver for less money on the used market? It
didn't even take that many months for me to get up to speed, but I spent
the money then, rather than waiting.

I was lucky, a year later when I got my ham license, someone lent me (for
a decade) a Hammarlund SP-600, which wasn't perfect, but it was almost
infinitely better than that S-120A. I probably could have kept the Super
Pro, but at one point when I wasn't using it much, he asked if he could
take it back to lend to someone else.

A couple of years ago, a 1950s Hallicrafter ad was making the rounds on
the internet, and that reminded me that Hallicrafter did seem to play up
that aspect, the foreign countries, and the exotic world out there.
Hallicrafters sold a record for some time as part of their advertising,
only 25cents. WHen I remembered seeing those records in their ads, I did
a search, and it's online, though I don't have a specific URL. I was 11
years old when I got that S-120A, all that exotic stuff and exotic
countries I could hear with it was part of Hallicrafter's promotion, and
certainly was a lure to me, when the reality was, those low end receivers
werne't likely to get much more than the strongest of foreign
broadcasters.

At the same time, that past is gone. I think I'd rather have the
illusion of it, the hope that it could happen, than being older and the
world a lot smaller, and that exotic world completely gone.

Michael