I picked up a wonderful old radio last week.
1972, made in Japan. That is almost half a century old.
Genuine PRESTAGS Era Technology. Would have been playing as the SPI classics came off the printing press.
It’s the Sony Earth-Orbiter CRF-5090. It really doesn’t get any cooler than a name like “Earth-Orbiter”. When it was released it must have been some pretty top notch kit.
It is big, heavy, and made of beautiful metal and chrome. Everything is rock solid unlike the junk made today. I bet most of today’s radios won’t be around in 48 years. And more to the point – it still works.
Here it is with the front cover closed, and then with the cover open next to my modern short wave radio, the Tecsun PL-880. I don’t think the modern one will be going strong in 48 years time.
It has a massive long aerial, and 9 bands including air band and marine band. The bands turn in an analogue cylinder with 3 bands showing at one time. Last night I was listening to the local AM and FM bands. I will need to play around with short wave.
I find it remarkable that it works so well. The circuitry must be primitive compared to the advanced circuitry now, and it obviously doesn’t have a PLL receiver or Digital Signal Processing and other features that enhance weak signals.
The sound is rich, crackles slightly until precisely tuned. It has a big shiny metal tuner with a fine tuner inside. Also a tuning meter. A little red light goes on inside the tuning band when a good signal is hit. All works fine. The main light works. The headphone jack works.
One great feature is that the front cover folds down, then slides in half way under the radio revealing a spectacular time zone map of the world, with a slider for calculating times. I love this map.
No power cord came with this radio but it did also originally hold batteries. Someone more technical than I has rigged up a pack inside the battery compartment than uses 10 x current AA batteries. This is the only post 1972 modification that I can see.
Why don’t we make solid beautiful equipment like this anymore instead of plastic junk with built in 3 or so years redundancy.
I found some history on radiomuseum.org.
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