Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, David Korchin, who writes:
Stumbled on this rig at an estate sale and laid out a cool $5.00 for her. She was mostly in pieces in a big plastic bag covered in a LOT of dust, and the battery compartment had seen better days. But I thought I could get it going.
Once I got to the chassis I noticed someone with a Golden Screwdriver had been rooting around in there (the PS module was missing screws to the frame and there was some solder bits dancing around inside).
Threw in 4 C cells: pots were noisy, but there was sound, and after liberal application of De-Oxit and some scrubbing the thing snapped to life! Quite good MW reception: I snagged KMOX 1130 St. Louis at 06:30 GMT this morning, a good hop of 960 miles.
Hammarlund only made this Weather/Marine band receiver in 1969-70, so it’s a rare bird, though probably not collectable, per se. Still, it was fun to get the thing operational.
Oh wow! Thanks so much for sharing your flea market find with us, David! I’m so glad you were able to not only give this HR-10 a proper clean-up, but also bring her back to life–and even snag some DX!
And your photos, as always, are simply gorgeous.
I’m curious if anyone else in the SWLing Post community owns or has owned the Hammarlund HR-10. Please comment!
Hammarlund issued a technical bulletin explaining in detail how to change the crystal to make the radio pick up another NOAA weather channel frequency. You can download this bulletin at radiomuseum.org. Back in 1969 all (except one) of the weather stations were on 162.55 MHz, so that’s what this radio is set to.
I just got one of these at an auction for $5 and restored it. Alignment was fine but the dial was off a bit. But it works well on all bands. It’s a little better quality than most of the transistor radios of that era, with a separate FM tuner module, gear-driven, and a weather band converter module. Speaker could have been better, and naturally the selectivity is poor by today’s standards. It has that 70’s transistor radio sound. It’s also quirky, as the tone control operates backward, there is a MPX out jack (great for people with FM SCA or RDS decoders), two headphone jacks, and shortwave coverage from 1.6-4.5 MHz.
I live not far from the old Hammarlund factory in Mars Hill, NC (near Asheville) which closed in 1973. This radio came out in 1969, possibly the last consumer product the company made.
I’ve never heard of it.
Indeed, I didn’t think Hammarlund was into consumer electronics, or even solid state.
Around that time, as the old guard was fading, some were moving to solid-state, but did it by buying from Japan, and rebadging. Hallicrafters did it, so did Drake.
But in fifty years, I can’t picture anything from Hammarlund. They were tube based right to the end, which seems more like a fizzle than a very specific end point.
I was going to say this was some oddity that happened to use the Hammarlund name, but it is the genuine Hammarlund symbol.
I got one in the leatherette case, almost pristine. Found it on eBay. Didn’t pay much for it. Works great, looks great too. Never knew Hammarlund made a SS radio. I believe it was made for them by Standard. I did find a set by Standard that looks exactly like it, though not in as good a condition.