Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
RIP: R.L. Drake SWL Receivers
All this talk about such a sad day, the R-8B now discontinued. I say: good
riddance! The death of the R-8B was a slow and painful one. The price crept up to $1500 and it lagged behind the DSP technology of the last five to ten years. It's platform was based on the R-8 designed around 1990. It was almost a joke that such an expensive radio had a cheasey plastic tuning knob with no "feel" whatsoever. The radio was built like a Muntz TV set, lacking adequate shielding. It's RF front-end was overloaded with a mulititude of internal birdies. My R-8B had a hunk of printed circuit board crudely cut and mounted behind the display board....a very cheap and ineffective effort at shielding. Drake service and its service manager Bob Frost were in a total state of denial when I complained about the internal birdies, some hovering at S-9 in the MW Band. I dumped my R-8A and 8B on ebay years ago. I would have loved to keep them, but they just were not up to the standards of my (keeper) Japanese sets. I am keeping a Drake R-8 (the original) as the best example of the series: no birdies, no sync hiss, a real metal knob...... |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|