35 YEARS OF RECEIVERS Chapter 6 By Michael Stevenson
I left shortwave radio in 1978 to chat on CB radio which only lasted for two years before I gave up radio altogether due to a change in my life, it was not until a decade later that I became interested in shortwave radio again. It was the year of 1988 and being in the electronic repair industry, one day a little old lady brought in a Sangean 808 digital portable receiver which interested me greatly, there was nothing wrong with the radio eccept the lady did not know how to work it properly, but, it gave me a good opportunity to be able to try out a modern systhesized digital tune radio and it seemed to work extremely well indeed which of course rekindled the old flame of listening to shortwave radio again. There was an electronic shop here in Port Macquarie which sold Sony equipment and after reading rave reviews on the 7600D, this is what I purchased and I was certainly not disappointed. I put up a 12 metre wire antenna in the back yard and was listening to heaps of stations once again! The Sony performed well and I really liked the digital display which told me the exact frequency I was tuned to and being PLL Synthesized, it was locked onto that frequency with very little drift (un-noticable on AM but it did drift a little on SSB).	It was also very nice to have direct frequency entry and a few memory presets although the stepped tuning was a bit of a pain, certainly not a patch on having a large continuous smooth tuning knob. I also noticed that the Sony was fairly easily overloaded with strong signals and sometimes Radio Australia (which always seemed to be coming in and melting the antenna) could be found right across the bands, switching in the attenuator helped but it also eliminated any weak stations you were trying to pick up, but, it was a great little radio and I heard many stations with it. It also had a great FM band which tuned right down into the Japanese FM band and I could pick up the police, fire and taxis on this VHF low band which I was pleased about which also introduced me to listening to scanners, I purchased a Realistic desktop scanner and put up a discone antenna which brought in many interesting local services. The Sony did me for a couple of years before I started looking for a better receiver, once again I was looking for a proper tabletop communications receiver and this will be the next part of my receiver story.
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