Almost every paragraph has multiple technical errors of a fundamental nature.
" ... but it was equally capable with AM (about 510 to 1620 kilohertz, which was referred to as “medium wave” in olden times), and the spectrum below that once quaintly known as long wave (148 to 420 kHz), and also FM."
AM and FM are modulation modes, not frequency bands. For example, most shortwave stations also transmit in AM. And on course FM is used in many places besides the VHF Broadcast band.
The Medium Wave and Long Wave bands are not "quaint". Those are the international designations for those particular wave bands.
"The preselector is a mechanism for filtering out frequencies that are closely adjacent to the frequency the operator selects, minimizing the potential interference from other signals on those nearby frequencies".
Completely wrong. Close in stations are removed by the main IF filter. A Preselector is a manually tuned RF stage which is intended to remove Image frequencies and other spurious responses.
And to say that a Preselector is "rare, possibly even unique" is utter nonsense. Good quality radios have an automatically tuned RF stage, it's only in cheap radios that a manual control substituted.
And it's a Band-Pass-Filter, not a Low-Pass-Filter.
"Hams on various Internet message boards argue about the relative technical merits".
No they don't. This is not a specialised Ham Receiver. It was specifically designed for Short-Wave Listeners.
Yep, the best receiver ever built is probably in the Flex 6000 series with the band filters. I have one, and it has insane amount of dynamic range, which is good as I have an AM station a few miles away.
To be fair, consumer radios do use "AM" to label the medium wave band, so it de facto has dual meaning (regardless of the origin). It is unfortunate, but this kind of "misuse" of special terminology is rather widespread: for example we all often say "atomic" when we mean "nuclear." I agree that it is important for a general audience to be aware of the high-school physics, but to call an article idiotic for not insisting on it is not fair.
This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.
Medium Wave and Long Wave bands are not "quaint". Those are the international designations for those particular wave bands.
Why can't they be both "quaint" and international designations?
The wikipedia description of a "preselector" sounds close to what they described:
A preselector typically is tuned to have a narrow bandwidth, centered on the receiver’s operating frequency. The preselector passes through the signal on the frequency it is tuned to unchanged, or only slightly diminished, but it reduces or removes off-frequency signals, cutting down or eliminating unwanted interference. However, a preselector does not remove interference on the same frequency that it and the receiver are both tuned to.
"Hams on various Internet message boards argue about the relative technical merits"...No they don't. This is not a specialised Ham Receiver. It was specifically designed for Short-Wave Listeners.
Are you sure they don't? Are you claiming that there's no overlap between hams and shortwave listeners? Here's one:
Several of the commenters have their ham call-sign as their userid. So if there's just one more message board where hams discuss the unit, this statement can be marked true.
> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.
Aiming at non-technical audience means you need to make things simpler, not wrong.
Also, since when non-technical people hang out at ieee.org?
> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was)...
The article appeared in the monthly magazine of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, so the audience is not completely non-technical.
However, having seen IEEE's decline first-hand over the past 25 years, they are clearly dumbing things down a bit to cater for all types of audiences, including non-EEs. Even their website now just uses the slogan "The world's largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology", and many of its articles now fall into the styles of those of retail science magazines.
For practical electronics engineering and implementation, things like Bunnie Huang's blog and documentation of things like the Novena "laptop" have far surpassed traditional publications like the IEEE Spectrum.
Shortwave listening used to be the gateway drug for many hams. That's the reason for the apparent overlap.
Receivers of this type are pretty useless on the ham bands. You can't even connect a proper antenna to it (technically you can, but the unit would struggle with overload issues).
>So if there's just one more message board where hams discuss the unit....
You can find exceptions to any absolute statement (including this one), that doesn't mean that all absolute statements are wrong.
Humans will talk about anything and everything. Try and think of something that would never come up on HN, and then search for it on the search bar. 'My little Pony' returns a surprising number of results.
> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.
I think it's worth pointing out that the difference between AM and FM being modulation is right in their respective names: Amplitude or Frequency Modulation. It's very descriptive - not exactly rocket science.
> The wikipedia description of a "preselector" sounds close to what they described:
It's also the description of a tuned RF stage, which any decent radio has. Except for cheap ones which make you manually tune it, and call that a "feature".
And read again what I said about the main IF filter. That's the one which removes adjacent stations.
As a former DXer, I used the Satellit at a time when the shortwave tropical bands were filled with exotic stations. Nowadays, I have my SDR with technical specs we could only dream about back then but on the same bands I struggle to find any stations at all. Blame the migration of shortwave stations to FM and the Internet over the past 30 years where they enjoy far better fidelity.
Shortwave DX relies on ionospheric propagation. Solar particles cause ionization of the upper atmosphere, which becomes mostly opaque to shortwave frequencies. Activity on the surface of the sun follows a roughly 11-year cycle, with alternating periods of high and low activity. We're currently approaching the low point of that cycle, but the most recent cycle offered unusually poor propagation conditions.
There has been an overall reduction in shortwave broadcasting, but there's still plenty of activity in Africa and South-East Asia. You're not hearing it because it's all drifting off into space rather than ricocheting around inside the atmosphere.
I'm trying not to get too worked up about it, but it's insane that they picked the Satellit 650 for the "Hall of Fame" instead of the Sony 7600 series, a revolutionary radio that was truly portable (615 grams) with great reception. The 7600 was also (not coincidentally) the all-time top selling shortwave radio and was in production for over 40 years (1977-2018).
Oooh, The ICF-7600GR. Bought one in Vantaa Helsinki Airport on my way to Russia almost 20 years ago to be able to listen to news I could understand while there. (After having lusted for one for ages, me being an intrepid DXer since late primary school an' all - drooling over the ads in every edition of the WRTH which arrived at my local library. (I suspect at my request - I seem to recall I only found references to my library card in the borrower list in the back of the book...)
Still listen to the 7600 almost daily - even as SW stations dwindle and the (lack of) solar activity does nothing to help matters, I still get excellent reception of the BBC World Service here on the west coast of Norway. (Which, much to my puzzlement, I still prefer to listen to on HF, even though it is available on DAB+, too...)
I'd love to have knobs and buttons on my iMac for audio volume etc. ... And no, something made from cheap plastic that transmits a bad approximation with noticeable lag over USB won't do. Perhaps it's time to get out the soldering iron.
Miss my Yacht Boy. Had it sitting on top of my car, while listening to a ball game. Forgot got it was there, and drove off. It hit US Route 11 at approximately 65 MPH after serving me faithfully for many years all around the world.
I've been using Yacht Boy as my alarm clock continuously since at least 1991-92. Love it: still produces great sound to wake up to. Go and find one on Ebay and get yourself a Yacht Boy!
Totally forgot about Grundig. They used to be such a solid company and now I don't even know if they still exist. IT's always amazing how quickly a well known brand can disappear.
They're still around in some incarnation! Apparently they got bought by Arçelik, a Turkish household appliances manufacturer, in 2007.
Here in the Netherlands, they now have a large range of cheap things, from button cell batteries to earbuds to remotes, cables, flashlights, cameras, navigation systems, you name it.
It's all ridiculously cheap (competitive with Aliexpress prices and sometimes better). Quality is not always great, but not as bad as it could be, and some things I've gotten are surprisingly well built (competitive with things 10-20x the price.) For example, a flashlight I got for 0.99€ with a solid metal construction that's survived whatever I've thrown at it so far.
And yes, they still make radios! Much lower quality, and not shortwave, but still.
I've got an AM-FM radio with an auxillary input that's still going strong since around 2007. How'd you find the owning group / what products they're rebranding?
The grundig site has a Beko UK security certificate! I'm pretty sure the Turkish group renamed some of their old Beko electronic divisions, including radio, to Grundig after the takeover. Not sure about appliances as Beko already had decent presence at the cheap end of the market, so Grundig was maybe a chance for them to try to move upmarket a bit.
Takeover was around 2007 so you could possibly have one of the last "proper" ones. No idea which particular products or if any old Grundig products survived a while longer. What shows up in search now is nothing like the type or quality I'd have once expected of the brand.
I remember selling Beko products back in my electrical retail days (around 2007 in fact). FWIW they were cheap and cheerful but not absolutely terrible quality at the time. Probably a step up from most of the supermarket own brands. Not sure how the company has progressed since then.
There was a small orange digital(ish) Sony I lusted after a few years after this unit. I think it even came with a premade dipole on a spool to plug in.
The brand name Grundig evokes images of TVs and radios (sometimes wood paneled) from the 80s that were still around in the 90s (of decent quality, but gradually getting replaced by black plastic stuff from e.g. sony) to me.
The device pictured in the article certainly does not invalidate that memory :)
Loved my Satellit 700! I was pretty hard on it when I had it as a teen but hopefully I can find some time to fix it up. Still has my carefully programmed EPROM chips in it.
Almost every paragraph has multiple technical errors of a fundamental nature.
" ... but it was equally capable with AM (about 510 to 1620 kilohertz, which was referred to as “medium wave” in olden times), and the spectrum below that once quaintly known as long wave (148 to 420 kHz), and also FM."
AM and FM are modulation modes, not frequency bands. For example, most shortwave stations also transmit in AM. And on course FM is used in many places besides the VHF Broadcast band.
The Medium Wave and Long Wave bands are not "quaint". Those are the international designations for those particular wave bands.
"The preselector is a mechanism for filtering out frequencies that are closely adjacent to the frequency the operator selects, minimizing the potential interference from other signals on those nearby frequencies".
Completely wrong. Close in stations are removed by the main IF filter. A Preselector is a manually tuned RF stage which is intended to remove Image frequencies and other spurious responses.
And to say that a Preselector is "rare, possibly even unique" is utter nonsense. Good quality radios have an automatically tuned RF stage, it's only in cheap radios that a manual control substituted.
And it's a Band-Pass-Filter, not a Low-Pass-Filter.
"Hams on various Internet message boards argue about the relative technical merits".
No they don't. This is not a specialised Ham Receiver. It was specifically designed for Short-Wave Listeners.
I could go on.