I'm enjoying everyone's posts, thank you.
I began my radio-diggin' as a kid with the vintage tube radios of my grandparents's homes. A big old Silvertone AM/SW console with that classic Silvertone look -- that big round copper airplane dial and bright green magic eye indicator -- features very large in my memory of my paternal grandmother's house when I was a little kid. SW was especially memorable, hearing all those strange, exotic songs and voices. They might as well have been from outer space to my impressionable little mind.
In my preteens it was a dark wood Zenith solid state AM/FM bedside tabletop that I enjoyed every night, and the magic of nighttime MW DXing became an interest long before I knew it had a name or was even a real thing *other* people enjoyed too.
Also during those years, one of my best friends had his own multi-band portable (I believe was a Sanyo model like the 8800 but it was FM/AM/SW/LW with a slide rule dial) that we listened to a lot, especially SW at night wondering what all the weird sounds were -- all the boops and pings and whooshing, bleeping signals. And since it had no BFO (not that we would have known we needed to use it if it HAD been provided) we had no clue about those odd, distorted Donald Duck-sounding inhuman voices we heard on the dial areas marked with little red lines with numbers like '40m' or '20m'... I'm pretty sure we thought they really *were* aliens. Even today I think at least one or two of those beings are in fact aliens. Or just pretty spaced out.
I also loved my homemade crystal radio! That thing let me hear Japan or the UK or Moscow or New Zealand on a tiny piece of rock (and then a 1N34 diode when I eventually found some)! That magic has never left me.
My first official multi-band receiver -- with a digital frequency display and real SSB and a real external antenna jack -- was a then-newly-introduced Grundig Yacht Boy 400. That little radio VERY quickly started me on the path of hobby madness I have been treading for decades now. All kinds of radio gear has been amassed since then, most of it used/vintage, along with plenty of mostly homebrewed antennas and accessories.
Hhhmmm. I didn't intend to write all of that at first... but thanks for letting me 'nostalge' for a moment.
Mike
N0TLD