(Source: WW2E on QRZ.com)

SWLing Post reader, Michael Black, remembers the Hallicrafters 45 RPM promotional record in a comment:

“All this talk of early listening, especially when it’s about the same period I joined in, reminds me of the Hallicrafter’s 45RPM record that was used as a promotional tool.  Send 25cents, get the record back, and hear what you could hear with a shortwave receiver.

I don’t think I ever had a copy.  But I did some searching, and it’s apparently available in multiple places on the internet.  I won’t add a link because I’m not sure which one would be most reliable.  But a search on “hallicrafter 45rpm” gave results.

One site pointed out that the average listener would not have been able to hear much of what was on the record.  But that too represents the image of the time.  My Hallicrafters S-120A had a horrible sliderule dial, but endless space to mark exotic places like “Antarctica” and things like “aeronautical mobile”.  The receiver was awful, you’d have a hard time hearing much other than the strongest of sw broadcast signals, but going into the hobby, some of that marketing was what made it exotic.  For those of us who were young at the time, it wasn’t just about this new world of shortwave, in some ways it was about “this new world” that was beyond our world that wasn’t much bigger than school.   Antarctica wasn’t just exotic because you might be able to hear it on shortwave, it was an exotic place to begin with.”

I took Michael’s advice and searched the term, “Hallicrafter 45RPM” and found this YouTube video. Enjoy: