Radio Pasts into Present

One was reminded this week of the past with a few more things emerging from Mum's room and oddly enough the Womens World Cup in football, a game she was an avid fan and uniquely for the period even played with her brother, now deceased, and the boys he was best friends with.

Back then if you wanted to find out what was on the radio or television you bought a weekly listings magazine you looked up the day and all then then broadcast stations.

Many had very vivid colour front covers and it's fair to say I can recall all of these and more and although today people use on screen guides, internet listings and the like you can still get the Radio Times just with less unique regional editions.

Mum did like the radio, especially local radio and when I was younger I did listen a lot to it at home and in the dorm so again you'd look up the listings for shows at this time of year the details of the evenings Proms concerts on Radio Three of the works performed that night.

Strangly enough I did like shows like Sing Something Simple, Charlie Chesters Soapbox and Richard Baker's 100 Best Tunes apart from much of output of Radio Three for classical and Radio One for current pop music

Apart from having a big mains only stereo with a record player, I did have a variety of portable radios cos the beauty of Radio was you could take it anywhere and be drawn into the programming and in the main they were fairly traditional sets.

Recently I did buy a new one but actually its pedigree is almost as old as me for being based on a nineteen seventies  set by Roberts called the Rambler which was a a relatively short wooden sided portable with a carrying handle designed to give a similar quality as their bigger sets but easier to pack with you.

Very dorm friendly I might add.

The current one keeps much of the looks from the outside but its internal gubbins are very modern which means from the outside a traditional tuning scale that had a pointer that moved showing what you were listing to no longer exists.

Instead with have a display that shows the station name.

When off it shows the time - and the display can be dimmed - and on VHF/FM while tuning the frequency.

It has just VHF/FM where most national and local stations are to be found and VHF band III Digital Audio Broadcasting (aka Dab) where many national stations that aren't on VHF/FM such as BBC Radio Six are.

You can have up to ten presets per waveband.

It has a single speaker but the headphone output is stereo as is the Aux input and Blue Tooth and while there is a version with two speakers I felt the extra 2.3 cms in length wasn't at typical distances going to give much stereo effect given how close each speaker was.

It runs of C cells or mains via a detachable mains unit.

There's just something simple and transporting back into the past of just pressing that on/off button and listening to its full sound.