Chapter 1
By Michael Stevenson
Here is a multi-part series about the receivers I have used in 35 years of listening to shortwave radio and my opinion of them. First, a short history of how I stumbled upon shortwave listening.
Back in 1966 I purchased my very first own radio, it was a Philips MT-6 portable mantle style radio which could receive medium wave only, I loved listening to this radio and was always keen on tuning the dial to hear how many distant stations I could receive, I never listened to local radio, only stations in the next towns or as far away as possible, I found this Philips was rather insensitive though and if I put my hand on top of this radio the more distant signals would improve, so, I thought to myself that it was time to open it up and try to put a better antenna onto it which I did with a length of wire hanging outside my bedroom window, it improved weak signals greatly, I also found that by twiddling the capacitor and coil screws on the circuit board, it would also improve reception.
One afternoon at around 0625 UTC (GMT in those days) I was tuning the dial and tuned into a rather strange musical station that was repeating the music, at 0630 the station said "Radio Nederland, Wereldomroep, Hilversum" then carried on in a foreign language (which was actually Dutch).
I was truly excited to receive such a distant station and I guess this is when the radio bug well and truly bit (I still have a scar!) My grandfather took interest in my receiving this overseas station and he then gave me an old portable valve (or tube) Astor brand of radio which had a shortwave band and run on batteries, he had no further use for it.
So, this was the very first shortwave radio I had, it was really great fun receiving all these different overseas stations (mostly in foreign languages with a few in English).
Unfortunately, this old valve portable was very heavy on batteries and it soon went dead, I renewed the batteries once but they were hard to get, had to come from New Zealand and were very expensive, so, I started to save up my money for a better shortwave radio that ran off the mains, this was a Sony TR-1300 portable multiband radio which I will tell you about in part two of my receiver story.
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