My wife and son are both E.E.'s and their explanation is that IC's
begin to degrade slowly as a result of impurituies in the wafer.
Simple components like capacitors dry out and resistors begin to open
up. Wish I knew more, but I can hear what they tell me in the radios
I've owned. I owned one of the comparison radios, the Panasonic
RF5000b. Big beast of a 24 pound radio with four antennas. It was
pretty insensitive by any measure. Sure it would catch the big
nighttime SW's but that was about it. Other radios, such as a Radio
Shack DX150b were still pretty sensitive (and still raspy sounding)
after 25 years, so the rate of degradation isn't a constant.


wrote:
I have a few old radios similar to that one.It is true about some of
the
electronic parts in radios degrading in performance over the years.I
wonder why? Moisture in the air gradually getting into the parts and
degrading them? I have been collecting old radios since I was a
kid,most
of them aren't anything special though.Whenever I would see a radio
at
junk shops,fleamarkets,thrift stores and wherever,if it's a radio I
liked and the price was right I would buy it whether it worked or
not.I
own a lot of old tube type radios and transistor radios.Some of them
do
not work at all,some of them sort of work and some of them work ok.
cuhulin