On the topic of radios with a wooden case...presenting the Ocean 214---from Russia with love! I bought it from a seller in the Ukraine, so shipping was on the high side, but surprisingly, I didn't have much competition bidding on the radio. I've been wanting to try a Russian/Soviet radio for quite a while, but simply couldn't get excited about the VEF series, because...how can I put this nicely..."they ugly...butt ugly!" The VEFs look like a big block of plastic with little or no imagination in the design. They might be great performers and high quality---I don't know, because I've never played with one---but I'm not excited by the looks. Enter the Okeah---I saw a couple different ones from this manufacturer, and settled on the 214. I like the wooden case and the various surfaces and colors used to make up the package. Mine is in good shape except for an antenna problem---the smaller top portions of the antenna pull out of the base. But it still receives well on all bands. Oh, but that's the other problem---the writing is in Russian and I'm totally unfamiliar with the frequencies they use. So I push buttons and turn knobs until I hear people talking or I hear music. It's an adventure. The sound is good---in a way, similar to my Lloyd's, supporting the argument that the wooden cabinet does have its own sound. In fact, the Okeah has more tone controls to play with and I can get a very satisfying deep sound for music, or a clearer, high pitched sound for talk. The shortwave bands do pull in stations nicely as well. I'm still figuring things out with regard to how these bands translate from radios I'm used to using. I can recommend this radio if you have interest in getting an Eastern European manufactured radio. From the little I could find on Google, it seems the factory for this brand might be located in Belarus. There is much more information on VEF, who must have been a much bigger company. But I like the Okeah---I like the looks, I like the woodgrain and I'm satisfied with the performance. I will say that it appears to be old, and wasn't babied as it was dirty when I got it, and apparently not extremely well maintained. But a few shots of tuner spray brought it to life and it sounds great. At some point, I might try my luck on E-Bay to see if I can turn a profit. But for now, I'm having too much fun with the radio.
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It's name is OCEAN, not OKEAH. Try to search by its true name on Ebay, or "Okean". Also exists export version, named "Veras" (BEPAC in russian), they has better quality and tuning, and his FM band covers 88-108 MHz instead of soviet 64-72 MHz.
Posted by: Account Deleted | May 27, 2009 at 12:21 PM
Thanks. I made the edit.
Posted by: Jeffrey McMahon | May 27, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Actually, it wasn't Jeff's fault---I'm the one who submitted the review and called it Okeah. I was reading off the radio.
Posted by: Angelo | May 27, 2009 at 02:55 PM
You can find it also as Smena. (Written with latin characters.)
My father had one, bought in the eighties. In those times products for population consume were scarce in Romania, and imported goods even more so. You could get romanian electronics products but they were of bad quality and mostly avoided. GDR, polish and soviet electronics were the ones sought after.
So he bought this Selena, more out of luck. I think it was pretty expensive and people didn't grab them the first day they were in the store.
This became the family radio for hearing Radio Kossuth from Budapest on MW (AM) and my father heard Radio Free Europe and Voice of America on it all night long. (These were of course forbidden.) I remember the frequencies on short wave: 49 m, 41 m, and some other.
On a visit to relatives of my mother in Széklerland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sz%C3%A9kely_Land), the family head was so impressed by the radio that he wanted one too and tried to buy it from my father, I think he offered him more than the store price was. My father decided to keep it.
Later on our relative got himself a Smena too, he was the local Communist party secretary in the village and put his conections to work. I'm just wondering if he also used it to listen Free Europe. :)
My grandmother bought herself a VEF, when she was visiting relatives in Budapest. In Hungary you could get soviet (and not only) products without problems. We have inherited the radio after she passed away. She listened mostly to Kossuth Radio.
Some years ago I got an orphaned OKEAN, so comes I know this is similar to the Selena, just minor cosmetic differences.
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Posted by: hikmat | June 11, 2015 at 01:21 AM
Hi, I am a happy owner of three such radios and I must say those not only look surprisingly good, but also excellent from the point of view of construction and design, both mechanical and electrical. They hold all the bells and whistles: tuned RF stage on all AM bands, what suppresses the mirror reception (especially important on SW bands), stabilized bias, which makes the radio usable even at exhausted batteries and prevents drift. The entire radio can be removed from its wooden cabinet and still remain operational, a relief at repairs. The sub-assemblies are easy to separate, I know because the FM tuner needed a re-tuning to 88-108 MHz, instead of the lower frequency used in Russia (I live in Hungary), but it was straightforward.
The Okean series and its export counterpart Selena were built originally with germanium transistors, but the later releases held silicon transistors and even integrated circuits in their FM tuner and power amplifier modules.
Later, post-1990 releases lost the wooden cabinet and look poorer. I did not study them, though.
Posted by: Laszlo Kalmar | June 25, 2017 at 11:21 PM