Herculodge:

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November 17, 2013

Three Vintage Radios Didn't Sell and I'm Fine with That

With very modest starting bids, 3 of my vintages sold. Three didn't: Panasonic RF-888; Panasonic RF-877; Sony ICF-5500. All are excellent. I'm glad they didn't sell.

Posted at 03:01 PM in Radio Lovers Can't Be Cured | Permalink | Comments (3)

November 16, 2013

Seiko Black Monster Second Generation on Amazon for $197.77 and Free Shipping

Great price on the second gen Black Monster. I think Amazon is having a general watch sale. Image above is mine with the upgraded Super Engineer II bracelet.

Posted at 01:23 PM in Manly Watches | Permalink | Comments (4)

Frank Has Reason to be Concerned About Receiving a Defective Tecsun PL-660

My PL-660 arrived yesterday from Kaito defective. Everything seems to work except the VFO knob. It does nothing. I contacted Kaito and surprisingly they dont do business on the weekends. 2013, and they close their internet business on Saturdays and Sundays? Whatever, but now I have to wait for an authorization code before I can send it back (at my own expense). I hope they arent going to wait for the defected one to arrive before they ship me out a new one, thus having this transaction last 3 days shy of a month!

Posted at 09:38 AM in Radio Lovers Can't Be Cured | Permalink | Comments (4)

Can Anyone Recommend a House Water Softening System?

My father emailed me explaining he needs a new water softening system for his entire house. I know nothing about this subject. Any recommendation?

Posted at 09:00 AM in Personal Chronicles | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 15, 2013

Almost Too Rare to Let Go, But I Hope It Finds a Nice Home

This rare Panasonic RF--1130 is extremely rare and I'm sad to be parting with it. I only hope it finds a nice home. When my girls grow up, I might find a mint Panasonic RF-2200.

Posted at 12:27 PM in Radio Lovers Can't Be Cured | Permalink | Comments (3)

Seventh Watch Added to the Rotation: Orient M-Force Beast

I've sold several watches over the last couple of months. I almost sold my Deep Blue Depthmaster, but decided to keep it largely because of its Superluminova, which is superior to my Seiko Tuna and Black Monster. The eBay lords punished me with a withdrawal fee for taking it off the auction block, so there's a blooper.

In any event, even as I lick my wounds, here are the seven in the rotation:

One. The newly acquired Orient M-Force Lefty Beast (my photos should be up next week)

Two. Orient M-Force black dial on bracelet upgrade (all upgrades are Super Engineer II)

Three. Orient M-Force orange dial on bracelet upgrade

Four. Seiko Tuna SBBN017 on bracelet upgrade

Five. Seiko Black Monster Second Generation on bracelet upgrade

Six. Seiko Sumo

Seven. Deep Blue Depthmaster, orange dial

Posted at 08:27 AM in Manly Watches | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 12, 2013

Toza Looks at Three Similar Sony Radios

Thanks, Toza:

I have a Sony ICF-SW100, ICF-SW1000T and ICF-SW7600GR. All of these are (more or less) the same radio in different packages. Sony does great job on SW starting from 41m, has the excellent sync-detector, but... The input for SW design is the aperiodic amplifier (common drain FET). This one has the crazy LC "filter" across the input and standard 470k gate resistor. LC filter resonates on first IF (about 55MHz) and on SW it is parallel (antenna loading) impedance of only 2kOhms. I have removed it (it is useless). Then I had to replace 470k gate for 1M, and serial capacitor from 220pF to 10nF. The radio got the sensitivity of a standard car receiver on high impedance antenna input, from LW up to 30MHz. Then, instead of (noisy) 2SK238 FET on MW loop and FM tuner I have applied Sanyo MOSFET 2SK3737 (pin to pin replacement), have made one bridge on PCB in front of FM tuner to cut noisy loop "antenna" there, replaced tuner bias resistors from Rd=47 Ohms to 100 Ohms (and they did the same on ICF-Pro80) and Rs=33 Ohms to 560 Ohms and everything came more-or-less "normal". MW DX vastly improved. All of these changes don't require LC alignment. There is also one 10nF blocking capacitor on the 1st RF coil to be "turned" to the opposite side to avoid loops.

Then, from the ICF-SW77 they decided to go "cheaper" and save the mixing transistor stage, so they started using the mixer inside of IC CXA1376 which actually created problems (high impedance input on IC relative far away from RF amplifier).

This way Sony has became more usable, still sensitive for stray fields and noise such as PC etc. I had lot of problems with intermodulation because I live on the 12th floor in the city.

Posted at 05:57 PM in Radio Lovers Can't Be Cured | Permalink | Comments (5)

Citizen Navihawk JY8035-04E

Posted at 03:09 PM in Manly Watches | Permalink | Comments (2)

Odious Sycophantic Scammers Try to Sneak-In My Blog with False Flattery

Every day I delete dozens of spammer comments, most of them full of cloying flattery, which I would I had saved so I could collect in a book. Here's a sample I was mindful enough to save:

"With blogs like this around I don't even need website anymore. I can just visit here and see all the latest happenings in the world."