A new short wave portable radio

 The history of World Band Radios and me goes back a long time and they tended to come in two forms with their own compromises.

There were desktop communication receivers such as the Yaesu FRG7000 that with extra modules did pretty much everything but were too heavy for regular carriage and then portables that traded performance and a mass of extras for ease of carriage and battery operation.

The portables tended also to offer things such as FM radio so they could be used as a regular radio.

The first one I had bought for me was a Russian Vega Selena B212 when I was in my mid teens which while crude technologically had a beautiful wooden Cabinet.

Later on as I became unwell, struggling to use the Yaesu, I got the Éton E5 which as based as a fair number were on a Sangean design with presets and FM stereo.

That's showing some issues and the plastic case has decayed leaving it tacky and prone to deep marks.

I bought recently a new portable that has much of that sets functionality and some different features.

One the first changes between the sets is the XHDATA D808 uses a replaceable 18650 Lithium battery which is charged within the set using a regular USB charger rather than four AA cells of the Éton reflecting concern about the environmental impact of regular cells and that modern rechargeables have plenty of hours usage.

Like the Éton this does have the ability to receive CW and SSB transmissions used by Amateur Radio operators on their own groups of frequencies called "bands" as well as some commercial broadcasters.

Unlike the Éton there is switching for both Lower and Upper sideband reception which improves reception in crowded bands.

The filter on the XHDATA has a steeper curve that makes it easier to ensure the ability to reject transmissions either side of the station you want to hear is achieved improving reception.

It shares the same high capacity memory that can set in pages for frequently listened to stations.

Time and for FM RDS data is displayed on a switchable bright backlight display.

For Medium Wave colloquially and misleadingly called AM band reception, the tuning steps can be switched from the 9Khz ones used in Europe, Africa and Asia to 10Khz ones used in North America from the front.

This set uses advanced DSP (Digital signal processing) technologies to clean up long, medium and short wave reception which the Éton lacked and at one time was a  "high end" receiver feature.

It shares the FM stereo coverage that covers from 64Mhz into 88.7 to 108Mhz so it will work in parts of Europe and Japan as well as the "International" radio Band II frequencies with the stereo output being available for headphones.

It loses the dedicated Line Out of the Éton but you can use the headphone jack to hook up to a separate amplifier or recorder using a 3.5mm to rca phono lead which are easy to buy.

One massive gain is the addition of the 118-138Mhz Aircraft band which saves having to have a separate dedicated portable that the Éton didn't have and the scanning function works on it.

The set comes with some accessories such as a carrying bag, an plug in external antenna for shortwave and a usb connector.

On balance I feel this is a better set of its sort for the money as much as the looks of sets such as Grundig's legendary Satellit 2100 and 3400 sets from the seventies and eighties appeal still to some at cost.

G is for Garters

 Bit of short post this week not being helped by being quite ill here but here goes.

Socks are a thing we are very familiar with and generally we wear long socks, traditionally with turn over tops with our short trousers but as most of us can recall one common problem tended to be that some socks seem to slide down very quickly.

Because generally it is held we should look smart and presentable at all times, most of us got told to "pull your socks up" literally a good number at times at school and other similar setting with standards.

Quite why some socks seem to stay up well for long and others do not isn't something I have cracked although it may be connected with the tightness of the sock weave and material.

In girls socks today the use of lycra in the elastic tends to work well in keeping them up.

Boys usually rely upon sock garters to hold them up that usually come in two forms, this which tended to be more common  is more like an adjustable elasticated band that once tightened and locked can be slide over the sock and is then covered by the turn over top of your socks.

The other is more familiar to us in traditional wolf cubs/cubs is a piece of elastic sowed together that holds the decorative sashs as here typically green which peep out of the turned over portion outwards.

Garters do play important part within boys and adult school boys lives, are items that are checked upon in certain contexts and are a part of our presentation.

Picture credits: Albert Prendergast Ltd of Derbyshire.

Looks and resting

 

The last week has been somewhat cold, temperatures often around the two to three degree mark during the day with wind chill in the minuses so perhaps it might of surprised some that I had bought something from the past.

It took some agonizing over it, but after a pretty long hiatus I bought a "proper" duffle coat with a modern microfibre lining with two deep pockets and zipped small inner ones after being without one from the age of sixteen and three quarters.

My old one had Beatles and Rainbow badges fastened on it on the left top in a  neat line and wooden toggles to which you fasten it up with and was bottle green in colour.

This one is grey with tough plastic toggles and an inner zip to fasten the front right the way up to keep draughts out and still feels hefty and as warm as toast.

It'll go with the reminder of my uniform.

Over the Christmas period I did watch a few Pantomimes on Cbeebies, the BBC tv channel for sevens and under and this, the current one was one of several simply cos with all the groan up noise about Covid, I needed to escape and get back to just following a story getting right in it.

Way back in time certainly at school from the earliest days many of us can recall being introduced to the standards about how we presented and the importance of correcting things like a untucked shirt or socks that were minded to fall down although I still think garters should of been mandatory as they do help.

Sock elastic is weird stuff, I have some socks that seem to stay up for long with no aids and adjustments on my part and yet others that I pretty much have to wear garters with as they'd be coming down within minutes of a brisk walk. 

Portable recorders

The odd time or two I mentioned something that was very much a part of my teenage years cos it pretty well went everywhere with me but only in passing.

The ITT Studio 720 went back and forth to boarding school with me because it was portable stereo cassette recorder that would plug into a stereo to play or record from records or the radio with a simple five pin "Din" connector but would run off batteries as well as mains.

Featuring both an internal speaker and a crazy German five pin 240 degree headphone socket that needed an adapter it was as much at home in the dorm playing back albums or recording live music with a pair of microphones as wired to my hifi at home.

I had this until the mid nineteen eighties but that all in one portable idea remained lodged in my head simply because it's so practical.

Moving on, there were special "field" recorders built for professional uses like news gathering, on the spot music recording etc made to replace the transportable Uher and Nagra reel to reel models used by the likes of the BBC that used cassettes instead.

They were like my ITT but pretty much on steroids, built to survive anything made by people such as Marantz and Sony.

The Sony TC-D5 was originally introduced in late 1978/9 with a special drive system to ensure that even when swung around there was no wobble on the sound and like all professional recorders has a minus 20db limiter in the microphone circuit you can switch in so the input from a loud rock group captured from the microphone doesn't distort before you set the record level.

That is a difference between my ITT that had both a automatic and manual record level but no such limiter and its mechanics were less advanced.

The model shown is the TC D5M which was a revised version from 1980 which allowed for the use of Metal oxide tape which was introduced in that period and as a result had Sendust and Ferrite heads fitted rather than the ferrite ones of the previous model to get get the best out of such tape.

Again my ITT could only handle type I "normal" tapes and using a auto sensor type II "chrome".

Being a Sony it also could handle type III ferrochrome tapes but they tended to be less popular and with tape advances in types I and II when it came to performance, increasingly outdated.

That is one reason why I bought a TC D5M because it does everything that ITT did but better up to and including having Dolby B noise Reduction which to be honest I tend not to be a fan of but is useful for any tapes recorded with it.

The small Sony WMD6 Pro series of pocket sized field recorders of the late 1980's offered the then new Dolby C but apart from having a few peak indicators, dolby C is incompatible with machines without and even more susceptible to audible decoding errors than B when played on one that does feature it.

Mine was bought with a leather carry case that allows full hand control of function with a section that gives access to the cassette tray to change the tape and a European mains adapter for 230 volt .

It has a five centimetre speaker for mentoring and adjustable headphone output apart from standard gold plated RCA line in and out sockets

There is just no comparison between the small and somewhat crude scale on the ITT's and these precise, back light ones that also double up as battery indicator although both machines used Volume Unit or Vu (known to some of us as "virtually useless" because they underread transients) metering rather than peak levels although the Sony has a single peak that flashes at +7db.

Those of us brought up in that era learned to read them, never straying over 0db which is helped on the Sony by a optional limiter that does carefully prevent any sudden peaks from overloading the tape progressively unlike one I knew on a National Panasonic home deck that just just cut the level right back to a very low setting which was both crass apart from being ill conceived.

The transport is wholly mechanical which was common place in the late nineteen seventies before solenoids, touch buttons and remotes came in apart from being top loading which was to lose favour for home decks as people stacked their hifi systems with the turntable on the top.

In terms of performance it approaches on the record/replay cycle a very high standard of reproduction equalling many expensive home decks even if this only has two unlike say most Nakimichi's that had  separate record and replay heads for off the tape monitoring.

As someone who just loves tape technology I hope you can see just why I love these machines.