Herculodge

Warning: Once You Cross the Gates of Radio-Philia, There Is No Going Back

Through this website, I have been in communication with a recent "radio convert," someone who suddenly loves radios and, like me, demands the best performance in them. He has recently written me:

Indeed, radio lovers can't be cured.

I'm perilously close to pulling the trigger on an Eton S350DL, even though I'm perfectly satisfied with my Kaito KA2100.

I should be all set. I have the perfect bedside radio, an ideal all-purpose radio, and a good pocket-sized portable. And yet I want the Eton S350DL. Sheez.

Notice the reader writes, "I should be all set." He is wrong. Radio lovers, myself included, are never "all set." There is always a new radio we think we can't pass up. We love to fall in love with radios. Sometimes we'll fall out of love with a radio only to fall in love with it, inexplicably, all over again.

I don't even know why I love radios so much. I'm not an engineer. I didn't grow up collecting radios. It's a mystery. One Fall day in 2004 at the age of 43 I walked into Circuit City on a whim. I didn't really want to buy anything with any urgency, but there it was, a blue Tivoli PAL for $130. I told my wife I wanted it and she approved. The incident seemed innocuous, but I had no idea that I had just entered the Gates of Radio-Philia for which there is no return. Two months later, I walked into Circuit City intent on buying a digital radio with presets. I was less than impressed with the speaker sound on the little Grundig radios, so I instead bought a Grundig S350. The S350's pseudo-military design ignited sparks in the reptilian centers of my brain. After that, I started reading radio reviews onRadioIntel and soon I had to get all the radios featured on the site including the Kaito 1101, 1102, and 1103. I'm sure I purchased over 50 radios and have spent around $5,000 during the last four years. I've sold many of them. I keep buying new ones.

The good news: I don't collect super expensive items like espresso machines, tailored suits, titanium watches, sport cars.

A possible explanation: I sometimes think radio lovers are looking for escape. Like everyone else, we get frustrated with all sorts of things and we feel helpless as we watch the news about our world going to hell in a hand basket. The radio is a refuge, an escape, and gives us a sense of control. I'll say to myself, "Yeah, the world is going to hell, but, wow, doesn't my Eton S350 really grab 89.3 FM with boldness and clarity!"

An annoying thing about being a radio lover: One thing that I find laughable about myself is that I see myself as having superior radio knowledge to the average person and stupidly I feel that this knowledge gives me a significant "advantage." I'll go to someone's house and sniff with contempt at their crappy Teac radio and think to myself, "What a poor lost soul. This is definitely someone who needs my help." So in fact being a radio lover has turned me into a supercilious know-it-all. How very annoying.

To conclude, I will continue to pursue my radio passion on this website, as my radio virus remains strong and there is not a vaccine or antidote on the horizon. At the same time, I laugh at myself as I am surely not blind to the absurdities of my obsession.

Through this website, I have been in communication with a recent "radio convert," someone who suddenly loves radios and, like me, demands the best performance in them. He has recently written me:

Indeed, radio lovers can't be cured.

I'm perilously close to pulling the trigger on an Eton S350DL, even though I'm perfectly satisfied with my Kaito KA2100.

I should be all set. I have the perfect bedside radio, an ideal all-purpose radio, and a good pocket-sized portable. And yet I want the Eton S350DL. Sheez.

Notice the reader writes, "I should be all set." He is wrong. Radio lovers, myself included, are never "all set." There is always a new radio we think we can't pass up. We love to fall in love with radios. Sometimes we'll fall out of love with a radio only to fall in love with it, inexplicably, all over again.

I don't even know why I love radios so much. I'm not an engineer. I didn't grow up collecting radios. It's a mystery. One Fall day in 2004 at the age of 43 I walked into Circuit City on a whim. I didn't really want to buy anything with any urgency, but there it was, a blue Tivoli PAL for $130. I told my wife I wanted it and she approved. The incident seemed innocuous, but I had no idea that I had just entered the Gates of Radio-Philia for which there is no return. Two months later, I walked into Circuit City intent on buying a digital radio with presets. I was less than impressed with the speaker sound on the little Grundig radios, so I instead bought a Grundig S350. The S350's pseudo-military design ignited sparks in the reptilian centers of my brain. After that, I started reading radio reviews onRadioIntel and soon I had to get all the radios featured on the site including the Kaito 1101, 1102, and 1103. I'm sure I purchased over 50 radios and have spent around $5,000 during the last four years. I've sold many of them. I keep buying new ones.

The good news: I don't collect super expensive items like espresso machines, tailored suits, titanium watches, sport cars.

A possible explanation: I sometimes think radio lovers are looking for escape. Like everyone else, we get frustrated with all sorts of things and we feel helpless as we watch the news about our world going to hell in a hand basket. The radio is a refuge, an escape, and gives us a sense of control. I'll say to myself, "Yeah, the world is going to hell, but, wow, doesn't my Eton S350 really grab 89.3 FM with boldness and clarity!"

An annoying thing about being a radio lover: One thing that I find laughable about myself is that I see myself as having superior radio knowledge to the average person and stupidly I feel that this knowledge gives me a significant "advantage." I'll go to someone's house and sniff with contempt at their crappy Teac radio and think to myself, "What a poor lost soul. This is definitely someone who needs my help." So in fact being a radio lover has turned me into a supercilious know-it-all. How very annoying.

To conclude, I will continue to pursue my radio passion on this website, as my radio virus remains strong and there is not a vaccine or antidote on the horizon. At the same time, I laugh at myself as I am surely not blind to the absurdities of my obsession.

Some of Panasonic's Best Radios from the Late 70s and Early 80s

Mike W. has provided some links to some attractive Panasonic radio models. He writes:

Panasonic sure has made some nice sets over the years, especially late 70's to early 80's. I particularly like the RF-1130/Cougar 113 :

http://www5b.biglobe.ne.jp/~AA676/radio/RADIO_NATIONAL_RF.htm

http://www17.plala.or.jp/receiver/bcl1.htm

http://www.fan.hi-ho.ne.jp/sato-kotaro/Diary2005.html

Is It Possible to Commit Bidding Fraud on eBay?

Suppose you're bidding on an eBay product and the seller isn't happy with the price he's getting. So he gets a buddy to bid on his product to inflate the price and then start a bidding war. There'd be a risk in that his buddy might get stuck with the winning bid, but a clever con-man might be effective at this game 90% of the time so that this type of fraud would be cost-effective.

Does anyone know if such fraud occurs and what safeguards eBay may or may not have to impede such activity?

Ed Strnad believes such fraud is impeded. He writes:

This practice is called "shilling"...it used to be more of a problem but ebay has instituted some safeguards. Basically they have software that tracks for patterns of shilling---ie, if the same bidder is bidding on the same buddy's stuff and never seems to win. Also, you can report it to ebay's "safeharbor" if you have eveidence of fraud.

But Jesse knows it USED to happen:

I know for sure that it USED to happen; my friends used to sell stuff and have mutual friends bid on it -- not something I'm too proud to say about my friends.

The Mausoleum Approach to Life

When I was a Cardio Junkie, I used my excessive running as a license to overeat. As a result, I never got my weight as low as I wanted. But even if I had got down to my lean, muscular ideal, I would have to be faced with the question: What does it mean to be alive? If maintaining your ideal physique requires such a narrow range of activities and the exclusion of vacations in which you sample different kinds of foods and may take you away from your workouts, dinner parties in which you’re sharing rich foods with friends, the casual hanging out with friends and family and talking and eating over long periods, living spontaneously in which you may not have access to the training facilities you need and the foods you normally consume, you end up living inside a self-induced prison. You look fantastic, but are you really alive? To be fully alive we should, most of us would agree, have spontaneity, intimacy, and regular human contact. But if maintaining your physical ideal requires isolating yourself, what have you become? A perfect exterior perhaps with nothing inside—a sort of mausoleum. 

I’m reminded of this gorgeous neighborhood in Palos Verdes where all the houses cost millions of dollars. Whenever I drive past this section of Palos Verdes I notice there is no sign of people, with the exception of gardeners, landscapers, and other workers. The houses themselves look empty and as a result they seem less like homes and more like mausoleums.  

This obsession with sacrificing our life to maintain a perfect image is what I call the mausoleum approach to life. Some of us not only do this with our bodies, but with our possessions as well. Take the man who buys an expensive car but rarely drives it, keeping it in the garage to preserve its perfection because the thought of it getting a ding or having its paint oxidized by sunlight and calcium-dense bird droppings is the source of his greatest nightmares.  His pleasure in owning the car is not in driving it but in the knowledge that it is sitting, in perfect condition, inside his garage. 

In a similar vein, someone may spend over a hundred thousand dollars making a new kitchen but never use the new stove or oven for fear of ruining the kitchen’s pristine condition with scorching smoke, fire, and scalding, bubbling water. Nor will he slice tomatoes or strawberries on a cutting board for fear that the acidic juices will spill and permanently stain his beautiful iridescent granite countertop. Nor will he invite guests to enjoy his new living room for fear that the snaps, buttons, and other protrusions from his guests’ pant pockets might gouge his four-thousand-dollar Italian suede sofa. This same individual will not own dogs and cats because of dander, fur balls, and other inevitable messes. He can’t drive his car. He can’t use his kitchen. He can’t invite people over. He can’t have dogs, cats, perhaps even children. There is something reductive about the way he tries to escape from life by creating an illusion of perfection and control as he nestles inside his soulless mausoleum. 

The cardio junkie does the same but his mausoleum is not his possessions but his own human body. Like Dorian Gray, his exterior becomes more and more perfect as his soul rots and decomposes.

 

 

Review of the Panasonic RF-888 "Cougar" Should Be Coming Soon

I purchased an RF-888 today on eBay and await its arrival for review.

If my research is correct, the Panasonic RF-888 was released in 1973 and seems to have been the predecessor to the RF-1150, which came out around 1975.  

Gerald Johnson owns an 888 and describes it as thus: big speaker with powerful sound, nice construction, film dial (like 2200), great fm reception and very good am. very rugged, very different looking radio with alll controls on top.

Are You Enthralled by Vintage Radios? Your Age May Have Something to Do With It

KR explains that vintage radios appeal to a certain generation what this older generation is looking for:

well, this was definitely, in my case an example of "one just went for $34 and i was beat by a dollar, and that isn't happening again" so i paid $11 over that and now have to explain the package to mama...

here is a thought, and it may not be applicable to you jeff, but a possible reason so many of us are listening to shortwave radios is to try to hear or recreate the past....

primarily, people listening to shortwave are over 45 or so, which is on the long downhill slope of the human lifecycle. people may want at some subconscious level to hear or touch or remember something from when they were growing up. and shortwave fits the bill...

i believe part of the reason people want to get back into the past, is an effort to feel something from the time they were a child. i think we are all wet-wired to want love and tenderness and affection.

thus the time machine.

Herculodge Reader Provides Helpful eBay Radio Recommendations

Herculodge reader Gerald Johnson has provided me a good radio list for those of you searching for vintage radios on eBay.

Don't be discouraged about buying these panasonics and sonys. it's amazing how durable these radios were and i've gotten very few that were "speaker tired". i just put it out there that it happens sometimes you get one thats been played to loudly or just simply abused in some way. by the way that 1080 has crisp sound, it's not a audio powerhouse,  when i said its a damn fine radio, i mean tuning performance and overall quality  is outstanding. after coming to some understanding of your criteria, for furture bidding keep these  radios in mind:
 sony icf-5500- 75.00 range
sony icf-5800 (rare) -depending on condition 100-150
sony icf 5900- 120.00 to 190.00
panasonic rf-1080- l60.00 to 80.00
panasonic rf-1150- 80.00 to 110.00
panasonic rf-1115-60.00 to 90.00 a sleeper
sanyo pr-8700- 100.00 to 125.00
believe it or not montgomery wards house brand "airline"
are damn nice radios generally manufactured by sharp (japan)
theres myriad others but, if ever you have a question on a radio that catches your eye on ebay let me know, chances are i'm familiar with it and can steer you.

I definitely will take up Gerald on his offer.

Herculodge reader Gerald Johnson has provided me a good radio list for those of you searching for vintage radios on eBay.

Don't be discouraged about buying these panasonics and sonys. it's amazing how durable these radios were and i've gotten very few that were "speaker tired". i just put it out there that it happens sometimes you get one thats been played to loudly or just simply abused in some way. by the way that 1080 has crisp sound, it's not a audio powerhouse,  when i said its a damn fine radio, i mean tuning performance and overall quality  is outstanding. after coming to some understanding of your criteria, for furture bidding keep these  radios in mind:
 sony icf-5500- 75.00 range
sony icf-5800 (rare) -depending on condition 100-150
sony icf 5900- 120.00 to 190.00
panasonic rf-1080- l60.00 to 80.00
panasonic rf-1150- 80.00 to 110.00
panasonic rf-1115-60.00 to 90.00 a sleeper
sanyo pr-8700- 100.00 to 125.00
believe it or not montgomery wards house brand "airline"
are damn nice radios generally manufactured by sharp (japan)
theres myriad others but, if ever you have a question on a radio that catches your eye on ebay let me know, chances are i'm familiar with it and can steer you.

I definitely will take up Gerald on his offer.

Journalist and Author Dick Meyer Sees Us as a Country That Has Succumbed to Learned Helplessness

 

Writing with thoughtful intelligence and keen insight, Dick Meyer, author of Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium, is sincerely haunted by several questions regarding our country’s current malaise: Why are so many of us lonely? Why are so many of us depressed and angry? Why are so many of us defensive and paranoid? Why are so many of us distrustful of everyone? Why are we so willing to accept phoniness and ineptness from others, including our government? Why have so many of us surrendered to a condition of learned helplessness and apathy in which not only do we not know what questions we should be asking to solve our depression, we don’t even have anyone to confide in should we know the questions we should be asking. 

To answer these questions about our country’s collective low-self-esteem and paralyzing depression, Meyer tells us a story about ourselves. The story is about a country that has lost common, shared values and virtues, a country that having lost community has replaced communal bonds with fierce tribes and clans that aggrandize themselves while demonizing their “opponents.” 

The beginning of this story is for Meyer, “Phase One,” the Aquarian Promise of Free Love during the 1960s in which there were no boundaries to the freedom, the ego, the sense of self. This Unlimited Freedom without a moral roadmap resulted in hedonism, egotism, and ultimately narcissism. 

Instead of maturing into responsible adults who give and take from a healthy community and family, we have become a bunch of whining, materialistic egotists, our inflated expectations of “selfhood” inevitably being dashed and resulting in greater and greater discontent, bitterness, and resentment. 

The 1960s was the beginning of “The Great Me Project,” which resulted in little islands competing against each other rather than a healthy community, which could provide the only source of our sanity—“social capital”—the sense of belonging, intimacy, and authenticity that healthy communities provide. 

Absent this belonging, intimacy, and authenticity, we fear we are battling against forces by ourselves and we must also be on guard, living defensively against predators, market scams, phony politicians, and the slew of B.S. that has become so ubiquitous. 

To compound our disaffected, isolated selves, our brains have become overwhelmed in the face of “Phase Two,” the Technology Revolution that dizzies us with so many contraptions and messages that we have lost our grounding, our core, our focus. We don’t know if we’re coming or going and we feel we’re about to explode. 

His call for community, less materialism, and more courageous standards for moral absolutes might be too late, but at least he is still kicking and fighting. 

While much of the book's material about narcissism and nihilism was familiar to me from other books, including  Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld by Thomas S. Hibbs and while his book addresses an overwhelming checklist of causes to account for our collective depression and low self-esteem, Meyer succeeds at telling us a cohesive narrative about our popular culture to show us the trajectory leading to our current condition of learned helplessness, loneliness, partisan humbug, and mistrust.

 

 

Looking at the Insides of the Tecsun R-308 and Eton S350 DL

"Scooby" takes a close look at two similar radios for our edification:

I took apart my R-308 today, just out of curiosity. I found good and bad things when I looked inside.

The bad thing is that the ferrite rod is rather short, at about 5" long. I was hoping there was a longer one in that big radio case, but it seems to do well with the 5" rod.

The good thing is that the tuning mechanism is better than what is found in the S350/S350DL radios. It is believed that some of the S350 series radios have mechanical drift due on AM to having one dial string operate both of the separate AM and FM tuners. I had always thought a gear based mechanism would make better sense, since the string is spring loaded and causes the tuning to recoil slightly. There is one spring on each tuner pulley, and it appears that one tuner springs back against the other tuner after turning. This is why you can sometimes get it to stay on frequency better (with AM) by tuning slightly past the station and then tuning back to the station.

The tuning on the R-308 is gear driven, just as I thought would have worked on the S350. The tuning on the R-308 doesn't drift on AM at all. There is a dial string that operates the dial only, but not either the FM or AM tuner.

I was glad to see separate tuners for AM and FM, like on the S350DL, as it appears to be a better setup than having AM and FM together on one tuner.

I still like the R-308 as a basic radio to use around the house and out in the backyard. My second one should arrive soon.

AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT

1) The tone control is simply a bass boost, and it only kicks in when you are near the bottom of the slider's travel. I would've made it control the bass in a more linear manner, and I would've liked a treble control right next to it. The bass boost is nice, as it improves the sound when listening through the speaker, and headphone listening sounds better when the bass is decreased.

2) The headphone jack is wired for stereo, but has the phases switched (like on the original s350). This does allow it to work with either a mono or stereo headset, but the bass response is lost when using a stereo headset. The solution to get good bass response when using a stereo headset is to use a mono to stereo adapter. I would've used either a mono jack or a properly wired stereo jack.

3) The sound output through the headset jack is too loud, meaning that you get a noticeable audio hiss when the volume is turned down. The original s350 also suffers from this, as do many other portable radios to some degree or another. The easy solution is to use an inline headset volume control, available from Radio Shack. I simply turn down the volume 50% on the inline control, and then I can listen quietly with absolutely no hiss. A complex solution would to be change out a resister or two in the radio, which I've only tried on one radio before. I probably won't get around to it with the r308, as I like using the inline volume control with my headphones anyway.

4) The dial pointer is not quite as accurate as I'd like. It's not too bad, and it is probably a result of cheap Chinese mass production. I can probably move the pointer up on the string a couple of millimeters and improve things considerably, but I'm already used to finding my favorite stations on the dial as it is now.

5) A dial backlight would be nice.

6) I've heard reports that people have difficult getting some brands of batteries to fit in the radio, but mine doesn't have this problem. Duracells, Energizers, and my cheap zinc chloride batteries all fit in my radio without any problems.

That's about all the negatives I've found after having the radio for a while. It's a good value to me for AM/FM radio for $32.90 (including shipping).

Sweating My Way to Oblivion

Keeping adequately hydrated was a constant struggle for a Cardio Junkie like myself, a man whose sebaceous and apocrine glands secreted two quarts of sweat for every forty-five minutes of training, or about a gallon of sweat loss for every ninety-minute cardio workout. To avoid headaches, dizziness, and fatigue, I made sure to drink over two-thirds of my daily water quota before my hour-long runs on the treadmill or the equally long sessions on the Cycle Plus/stair-stepper combo, for during these excruciating feats of self-abuse, I dripped enormous puddles of perspiration—sweat pools so wide and deep on the rubber mats below me that no one, gym members or management, really believed they are looking at the sweat generated from a single human being. Rather, witnesses of my salty sweat lagoons assumed there was an acute water leak somewhere in the gym, a cracked pipe, a roof leak, or a faulty fire sprinkler.

Running on the treadmill, my sweat flew off my head and fingers and forearms with such abundance that the people flanked to my left and right received a complimentary shower of my saline fluids. I was yelled at, admonished, cursed, threatened with being reported to gym management, given the evil eye. One man shook his head at me and, before walking out of the gym, said he couldn’t take it anymore.

For the sake of my fellow gym members, I contemplated quitting the gym and training at home, but I reconsidered this self-imposed quarantine when I realized that my sweat would inevitably peel the paint off my walls and make my condo reek of ammonia.

There was also the matter of how attached I had grown to some of the cardio machines. Sweating the way I did apparently created neuro-chemical bonding between man and machine so that I had developed a rather disturbing fondness for some of the cardio equipment.

Resolved to train in my communal purgatorium, I continued to run on the treadmills and manically wipe the perspiration from my head and arms and hands, but within seconds sweat was once again flying off my extremities and splattering everyone in my vicinity. Regular gym members had learned to avoid me. If they could, they used a cardio machine that was a safe distance from my body, a veritable sweat sprinkler system.

Sometimes, if I deemed the person to be a good soul, I apologized and made an extra effort to wipe the sweat off me. But in other cases, when the person’s body odor was rich in whiskey, nicotine, fried onions, or some other unsavory smell, or worse, if the person had putrid breath, the kind that billowed in my direction while I was trying to breathe clean oxygen into my lungs, I punished the offender by exaggerating the swinging movement of my arms in order to “throw” more sweat in that person’s direction, until he or she could no longer tolerate my sweat shower and, much to my relief, had get away from me entirely.

However, no matter how much I took satisfaction in my pathetic and infantile gym battles, I want to make it clear here that I was not derelict in my duties regarding my sweat. In accordance with gym regulations, I toweled off my perspiration from the cardio machines, but there was nothing I can do about the sweat lakes that shimmered below me on the rubber mats. Trying to wipe up that mess would be as absurd as trying to sponge up the Red Sea. The following is no exaggeration: There was a recumbent stair-stepper that I liked because it was remote from everyone and everything at the gym. I had sweat there so often that the black rubber mat beneath the machine had a bleached look, as if the strong chemicals in my body had stripped it of its color. It appeared that there was a white encrusted salt deposit over the rubber mat. I sometimes wondered if I left my sweat stains like a badge of pride, territorial, glandular markers that established my possessive, almost proprietary, relationship with the cardio equipment.

My spectacle of sweat didn’t end with my workout. After exiting the gym, I stood in the parking lot by my car and wrung out the sweat from my workout shirt, watching with wonder and an almost inexplicable satisfaction at what appeared to be a gallon of sweat pouring steadily onto the asphalt below. Perhaps this public display was my way of showing the world that I was a hardcore Cardio Junkie. On another level, perhaps I relished in the suggested purgation of watching all that sweat that represented my hard work, my discipline, and my commitment.

And yet there was little glory in this public exhibition. In fact, I suppose most people were repulsed at what they saw: A grown man hunched over, grimacing, squeezing out every last drop of sweat from his tattered T-shirt. Having done this for the last several years, I imagine hundreds of people driving their cars across the strip mall parking lot had seen me do this repeatedly. And this is all they know about me—an exhausted, middle-aged man wringing enormous volumes of sweat out of his shirt and making a puddle on the pavement. What kind of inferences did they make about me based on this limited knowledge of my behavior? What kind of pathologies were they assigning to this man who seemed to relish in the spectacle of his own sweat? Perhaps people thought I suffered from some rare disorder, which had its own name, like “glandular sweat fetishist” or “manic perspirer fixation” or something.