By Don Moore
More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
I’m spending April and May wandering around northern Spain and northern Portugal. My goal is to visit places I haven’t been to before, but I also have to return to Salamanca. I had been there twice before, but Salamanca is the kind of place that draws a person back. I love to wander the back streets of the old city. I also wanted to find some things I hadn’t done before, and that’s how I came across the Museo del Comercio (Commerce Museum) in a modern neighborhood east of downtown. That may not sound very interesting, but I knew immediately that I would have to go. One of the two main permanent exhibits is a collection of old radios.
Most of the items on display came from the collection of Agustín De Castro. Agustín was born in Salamanca in 1928 and began building radios when he was eight years old. Here’s one of his early radios.
As a young man, he went into electronics and eventually operated his own radio store and radio repair business in Salamanca. He donated his vast collection to the city in 2002, and in 2006, it became part of the new Museo del Comercio, which was opened in Salamanca’s old underground brick water cistern.
I might only DX on modern SDRs these days, but I still love looking at old radios. Everything here is in excellent condition and is kept in glass display cases to keep it that way. Unfortunately, that does make it harder to get good photos without getting glare or reflections. But I think these came out pretty well.
Let’s start with a closer look at a few of the more usual pieces.
The Gram Model 157 was built in Spain in 1947. I liked this one for the fancy logo on the dial. Note that while the medium wave band at the top is marked in kilocycles, the shortwave band at the bottom still used meters.
The Fono model 140 was also made in Spain in 1945. Again, the dial used kilocycles for medium wave and meters for shortwave.
This 1940 RCA radio/phonograph is one of the few items that didn’t belong to Agustín De Castro. What caught my eye was the original station list inside.
The LAK Radio was a small set made in Spain in 1950. It’s also medium wave and shortwave, but now the shortwave dial has frequencies instead of wavelengths. Likewise, the 1960 Vanguard Atlas from Spain uses only kilocycles.
Two Unusual Designs
The next two sets will show that there were some rather unusual designs coming out of France. This first set is a Philips A-48-U made in France in 1942. The dial is on a panel that folds down when the radio is being used and then snaps back up when it’s not in use. I think the idea is to give the user a way to put the radio away without having to move it. Notice that the knobs are also mostly hidden. The tuning knob just barely sticks out from the front of the fold-down panel. Two other knobs are at the bottom of the speaker grill on either side.
I wish I could have gotten a better picture of the dial markings on this, but there was too much glare at other angles. The A-48-U was only produced in 1941-42 in Paris, which would have been under Nazi occupation at the time. Nevertheless, the dial still lists Daventry, London, and Droitwich, although it would have been illegal to listen to those British stations in occupied France. The dial also shows New York, Boston, and Moscow, but it’s possible the plates were made before the USA and USSR were part of the war. Continue reading →
Today, BBC Radio 4 will air The Sound of Soft Power, a documentary presented by Josephine McDermott exploring the history of international broadcasting and the role shortwave radio played as a tool of soft power during the Second World War and Cold War.
