What Radio Did you start your listening hobby with?

[East Troy Don]

Sad but true.  Parallel axiom to a boatload of SW broadcast stations that don't broadcast anymore. Cause & Effect rears it's ugly head.  Who wouldn't want to hear an English broadcast out of  Radio Damascus today?  Or the TASS blather from Radio Moscow commenting on Crimea, Ukraine, Etc etc etc. .
And while we're  polishing the past and bitching about the present I'm still trying to figure out why my (now long gone) Kenwood R-600 with an Eavesdropper Trap Wave antenna outperformed anything I have today.

" Am I  ranting ?  I hope so - my ranting gets raves".
           - HAWKEYE PIERCE.  MASH 4077th -

[Charlie_Dont_Surf]

Thing I note abt this thread is there's a shtload of people who used to post here and don't anymore.

It must be my bad B.O. driving them away.

[KM0NAS]

I didn't have much exposure to SW when I was a kid. My dad was on AM radio though so I would listen to him. I also had the Radio Shack Sky Talker walkie talkies which I thought was pretty cool. I also remember driving around with my dad as he tried to DX our local AM radio station (the same one he was on) from thousands of mile away after dark while we were on vacation. It was a clear channel station and he was trying to pick up the local football game from back home. We were able to make it work.

I didn't really get into the hobby until I stumbled upon online SDRs. From there I wanted to know what I could hear from my QTH. My first radio was a Realistic DX-305 and then a Kenwood R-1000.

Neither get any use today as I got my ticket and now just listen on my TS-570D transceiver.

[Pigmeat]

Sad but true.  Parallel axiom to a boatload of SW broadcast stations that don't broadcast anymore. Cause & Effect rears it's ugly head.  Who wouldn't want to hear an English broadcast out of  Radio Damascus today?  Or the TASS blather from Radio Moscow commenting on Crimea, Ukraine, Etc etc etc. .
And while we're  polishing the past and bitching about the present I'm still trying to figure out why my (now long gone) Kenwood R-600 with an Eavesdropper Trap Wave antenna outperformed anything I have today.

" Am I  ranting ?  I hope so - my ranting gets raves".
           - HAWKEYE PIERCE.  MASH 4077th -

In those day's I generally listened to Swiss Radio International, I figured they didn't have a dog in the fight?

I liked some guy's in Costa Rica,too. What did they call it, Radio For Peace International? There were some strange ranger's there,which is what made them interesting.

I was wondering why the Bunnette's showed themselves yesterday? It was Easter. I guess they're waiting for him to rise? They don't know a thing about yeast,you've got to let it rise, pitch into your mash then let it ferment, the entire mess will rise. If you cremated him you're out of luck. Good luck!

[Pigmeat]

It's interesting how this is breaking down. Over 50 and it seems like you got the bakelite and and wooden boxes full of tubes Grandma didn't want to haul to Florida. Under that age you got solid state boxes with leather-rite exteriors that had all sorts of bands and nothing to hear.

[jasmine]

RTL-SDR was my first and quickly after that i got an SDRPlay RSP1a. now i own those and an Airspy HF+ Discovery which i love. i only got into this hobby less than a year ago though.

[East Troy Don]

It's interesting how this is breaking down. Over 50 and it seems like you got the bakelite and and wooden boxes full of tubes Grandma didn't want to haul to Florida. Under that age you got solid state boxes with leather-rite exteriors that had all sorts of bands and nothing to hear.

And every hardware store had the compulsory tube tester to let you know that, once again, your 35W4 half-wave rectifier was shot.   Fun stuff back then though - my 1940 Mantola tuber is AM/SW but, of course, no FM.  Still works - I pulled in Radio Helliniki out of Avlis last week.

[Pigmeat]

The drug store next to grocery store had the tube tester here. The pharmacist sold me Playboy's. His reasoning was "If you can grow a mustache, you can buy Playboy."

The dept. store from down the street had something that was supposed to have been pulled of the market years before, an X-Ray shoe fitter. The owner was the Mayor and did what he wanted. Al could have built his Death Ray years ahead of schedule with that baby to concentrate the X-Rays on Jughead, Moose,Archie, and Reggie. Riverdale was just a mile or so upriver.

[europirate]

First HF receiver - the HAC single valve (tube) kit from an advert in Practical Wireless, mid 1970's

First commercial receiver - the Yaesu FRG-7

[MajorHabu]

Heathkit GR-81 Super regen circa 1960. Got my 1st QSL from HCJB using thar RX.

[alpard]

Sanyo 3 bands portable with telescopic antenna built in.
MW SW1 SW2.  It worked ok but couldn't find the same station twice.

[N0TLD]

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

[radioreddz]

A Radio Shack Realistic DX-160 I sold a dirt bike to buy in 1975 that I still use everyday for my medium wave listing.

[N0TLD]

A Radio Shack Realistic DX-160 I sold a dirt bike to buy in 1975 that I still use everyday for my medium wave listing.

I love that radio. I had one with the matching 150 speaker for a number of years, and later used it with some larger tube-amped speakers, making for a much richer, warmer audio experience... but I loved it with the 150 speaker too! I eventually gave the 160 to a dear friend who still uses it every day. I might need to acquire another set soon, I really enjoyed using that one.


Mike
N0TLD

[chanito]

It is an amazingly good sounding vintage glam-wave radio.