An old Hallicrafters radio I bought on Ebay a couple of years ago for $20, which I cleaned up and last week decided to sell because I rarely even look at it, has been bid up to $255 with an hour to go. In these hard economic times, it’s hard to understand. There seems to be money to be made just buying stuff on Ebay, freshening it up, taking a few decent photos, writing a semi-literate description, and re-auctioning it, starting the bidding very low.
I’m not complaining.
My new Yaesu VR-5000 all band receiver: tunes between approx 100kHz all the way through 2.6GHz (excluding cell phone frequencies).
It is a thing of beauty but devilishly hard to understand. Here it is tuned to Voice of America, with a strong signal even though I’m only using a few feet of wire as an antenna.
Here is a photo of the MGB’s radio, specially for semioticwarrior
I ordered a new gearstick knob from Moss. It’s the wrong size. And this, despite the fact that I verified twice with pre-sales that it would be the right size for my car. Which is irritating. To say the least. That’s the trouble with ordering things online: if you have to send them back it’s a royal pain in the plonker. You can’t just nip round to the shop and get a replacement, you have to faff around with packaging and going to the post office and so on.
I can’t stop buying radios. Here’s a lovely little AM/FM solid state radio I picked up in Goodwill for $8.
It works well: a nice tone from the built in speakers. Real wood case … not a mark on it.
And, by the way,
| Your Linguistic Profile:: |
| 50% Upper Class Queen’s English |
| 40% Middle Class Twerp |
| 5% Lower Class Flat Cap Yorkshireman |
| 3% Silly Welsh |
| 2% Grunts and Moans |
Another Ebay “moment”:
Nine tubes in this, frequency coverage from 500kHz to 30Mhz. Bandspread, wide/sharp crystal tuning, BFO, antenna trim etc.. Built in about 1960. It was a little dirty when it arrived, so I spent some time cleaning it up and re-lubricating the switches. I took out the bandspread dial, and started to run water over it to remove the dust. All the damned white lettering came off and collected in a puddle in the sink! What a nightmare. Since then I have been trying to recreate the markings. Fortunately I had a photo of the receiver as it was, and so was able to create a Powerpoint facsimile of the dial letterings. But the big problem is printing white letters onto a transparent label/sheet that can be applied to the dial glass. As can be seen in the photo, I am making do with a green lettered print onto a translucent label. Not very satisfactory. I need kristenlou, the signage goddess, to advise.
The receiver itself works very well indeed. It is more sensitive (and certainly easier to use) than my digital Sony direct tuning ultra-modern SW portable. You’d think there has been a lot of progress with technology of this type since 1960, but evidently not.
