Mission Statement: Herculodge: The Essential Guide to Saving Your Manhood in an Era of Shriveling Masculinity.
I can be e-mailed at herculodge@frontier.com
I like my Orient Saturation Diver on the Super Engineer II bracelet, but I'm even more drawn to the Endmill bracelet by the same company Strapcode as it's less busy. Could be a switch.
If out of my watch collection totalling eleven, if nine were lost or stolen and I was left with my EcoZilla BJ8580 on a Suppa bracelet and my Citizen Promaster BN-2029, I could survive as I waited for my home insurance policy.
The bold toolish styling of the aforementioned watches with their decent lume and Eco-Drive technology (solar means no battery changes) makes them appealing on looks, quality, and durability. If you're looking for nice watches in the $500 ballpark, it's hard not to consider Citizen.
Was I going to get flop sweath from a regretted watch purpose? Was the Citizen Promaster Aqualand BN-2029 going to be too big in a ostentatious Las Vegas kind of way evidencing a man taking steroids to overcome his shortcomings?
My anxieties were pretty bad. The eBay seller sent me the wrong watch last week and I had to go through the hassle of sending him the $200 watch to get this $530 monster.
Right out of the box I knew I was in good shape. The purported 53mm plays more like a 50mm since the bezel is 49mm and you don't get the full 53mm unless you add the depthmeter and crown on the left and right.
Then there was the matter of the rubber strap. I'm very picky about those as many cause my wrists to itch and sweat. However, this one is soft and kind. The strap is long so that there is a little overlap, not much, as I fit it over my 7.5 inch wrist.
I love the deep dish dial and analog crown setting. I haven't tested the lume yet. I'm wearing it as I write this and the watch feels light on the wrist.
It's fishing versus eating fish; I do enjoy fishing, but I eventually want to eat the fish (and a lot of it.) Given a finite amount of free time, the choice between listening to some mindful and inspiring content as opposed to trying to dig out a legible signal from noise is not so fair a comparison
Bill writes about his misgivings with Internet radio:
If all you care about is sound quality, Internet Radio can be your new Superadio. However, it is not a Superadio in several ways. The following occur to me:
It is true Internet Radio doesn't need any wires or outside antennas... except of course you need the whole blasted Internet. You need either a wired, WiFi, or cellular data connection to the Internet for it to work at all. Hard as it may be for those of you who are urbanized to understand, there are places not far from you where these signals are just not available.
That's without adding in power failures, cell system slowdowns, disasters, emergencies, or just simple holidays when the cell system is overloaded, and so on. The Superadio continues to work fine however many other people are trying to tune into the same signal. The same can't be said for internet radio.
The Superadio is a buy-and-forget solution. Once you've bought your radio you have no ongoing expenses except batteries or line electricity to power it. Streaming Internet Radio requires an ongoing Internet connection, which costs money. Granted you probably have this anyway. In my case, though, for pure portable operation I have to fall back on a cell phone whose data is, effectively, limited. Heavy audio streaming is going to eat up my data. Radio won't.
For the tinfoil hat crowd, it is harder for The Man to know what you're listening to with a radio, or that you're listening to anything at all. It can still be done but Internet Radio leaves footprints all over the place, showing what streams you heard. That might be a serious non-paranoid concern for some people, I suppose.
(I find a radio easier when I just want to tune something in casually, without having to work at it or decide in advance just what I want to hear. That's just a matter of taste, though, so it doesn't really count as an advantage.)
I have just received my Tecsun PL-600 today and I am really impressed!
My Sony ICF 7600D is showing its age (being a purchase in the 1980's)and wanted something I can take outside with me and leave the 'old girl' safe at home.
After many reviews and YouTube videos, I am glad I made the choice of the 600 over the 660, and it was more than just the $30.00 price difference. (600= $90.00 & 660 = $120.00 AUS. for an 'air-band.)(I tried the 'Air-band' mod and it did not work, as the radio was made in March 2012. Oh well!)
The sound is great. I love the sound on the FM band, which is worth the outlay just on this feature alone!
The plastic flap thing on the back is a big issue with this radio. Also, you cannot lay the radio flat in its back and extend the antenna upright, like you can do on the Sony 7600 series of radios, but I can work around this quite easily.
The controls do take a bit of getting use to, but once I have played around with the features a little, I was able to 'tamed the beast' and have had great use from the unit.
The manual is a little 'quirky' in some of the instructions, but is not no-where near the bad 'Asian-English' translations used. (No offence is intended to any non-English speaking people) I may have written this too early in the history of the life of this radio and may find fault in the 'new' radio. Hopefully, it will pull its weight. I am not expecting this to be a 'better' radio than the 7600, it has been worth the cost so far. When the sun goes down will tell how it does go on the SW bands. The comments about the 600 vs. 660 radios have proved to be valuable in my selections, so thank you for your comments.
There has been much to-do about the Sony SRF-39 "Ultralight" over the years. The latest was a newspaper article on the clear case FP jail version...
the article inferred that maybe this version was more durable,i.e. the variable cap was not subject to the dreaded "Rice Krispie" snap crackle and pop defect on AM due to use of poor (cheap) paper dielectric material.
Unfortunately that has not been seen here...brand new FP versions have it,as well as new vintage Malaysia-built SRF-39's which are supposed to be good. It appears the defect is found in all these caps,whether they're in a 39,49,59,SW-10,11 etc. Just comes with the territory.
One result of the article was to run the ebay price of the FP version up from the usual $20 or so to well over $100...they are back to normal now.
But now for a just-discovered secret:it's possible to -maybe- get around the variable defect by use of a pre-ultralight Sony:
srf-19w
Back around 1987 Sony came out with the SRF 19w and then 21w.
srf-21w
If they look similar,they are.Who knows what Sony was thinking (they did the same thing with the first-generation SRF-33w and 22w BTW). But both have performance that is very very close to the 39 family Ultralights.The variable however appears to be a different type since these were made in Taiwan.
No snap,crackle or pop was heard on these.
What was heard was excellent sensitivity/selectivity.
Use of a 3 volt supply gives the audio real punch,too.
On FM they do very well,especially on low power stations. The 39 family has afc problems with adjacent stronger stations. Not these,they slice and dice quite nicely. Typically they go for $15-30 on ebay.
What to look for:
The top dial cover was hot glued on;if the pointer sticks check for this.
The off-on switch is a real pain to remove and put back on...it's like they wanted to make it as hard as possible!
Tuning is a little "firm" due to use of dial cord... these may have been the last to use dial cord since the follow-on SRF-29 had the current plastic pointer setup.
A web-connected device linked to a hi-fi Bluetooth speaker is the new SuperRadio.
I've been listening to KKNE out of Honolulu, HI using an iPad playing through a Sony BTX500; the reception is better than is physically possible with a radio receiver, and the sound is better than the SuperRadio 5268, all with no antenna and no wires..
Val has apprised us of the Panasonic RF-562 analog radio, selling on eBay today and reviewed by Nathan about a year ago, posted here at Herculodge. Nathan says it's a solid performer but that the treble is too high for music.
Val reviewed the Sony ICF-801 analog radio over a year ago and recently I've seen it on Amazon Prime for $99.99. I'm intrigued by its good speaker sound and FM, but is its AM good eough to make it "super"?
I ask this because now that the GESRIII is gone for $40 and the new RCA version has so many quality problems, it would be nice to have a new "Super Radio."
If all you care about is sound quality, Internet Radio can be your new Superadio. However, it is not a Superadio in several ways. The following occur to me:
It is true Internet Radio doesn't need any wires or outside antennas... except of course you need the whole blasted Internet. You need either a wired, WiFi, or cellular data connection to the Internet for it to work at all. Hard as it may be for those of you who are urbanized to understand, there are places not far from you where these signals are just not available.
That's without adding in power failures, cell system slowdowns, disasters, emergencies, or just simple holidays when the cell system is overloaded, and so on. The Superadio continues to work fine however many other people are trying to tune into the same signal. The same can't be said for internet radio.
The Superadio is a buy-and-forget solution. Once you've bought your radio you have no ongoing expenses except batteries or line electricity to power it. Streaming Internet Radio requires an ongoing Internet connection, which costs money. Granted you probably have this anyway. In my case, though, for pure portable operation I have to fall back on a cell phone whose data is, effectively, limited. Heavy audio streaming is going to eat up my data. Radio won't.
For the tinfoil hat crowd, it is harder for The Man to know what you're listening to with a radio, or that you're listening to anything at all. It can still be done but Internet Radio leaves footprints all over the place, showing what streams you heard. That might be a serious non-paranoid concern for some people, I suppose.
(I find a radio easier when I just want to tune something in casually, without having to work at it or decide in advance just what I want to hear. That's just a matter of taste, though, so it doesn't really count as an advantage.)