Sunday morning, I attended the Sainte-Foy flea market in Québec City. When I’m in QC, I love attending this particular market because of the amazing variety of things for sale. It’s a proper community event.
As I was browsing the various tables, I happened upon one of these:
Talk about a blast from the past!
Yesterday, I posted a cropped photo of this radio and it was quickly identified as an 8 Track FM radio converter by Ken (N2VIP). Steve Yothment found the same unit under a different brand and Bill Lee even found a Futura branded unit on the Internet. Of course, many others figured out this was an 8 Track to FM radio converter. Impressive sleuthing!
These radio tuners were popular in the days of the mobile 8 Track players–in that time period right before FM was standard in car radios, but 8 Track was somewhat prevalent.
My father had a similar FM radio converter for his 1966 Chevy pickup. As a kid, I thought the thing was fascinating! You simply inserted the unit into the 8 Track player and voilá!, FM radio!
I never quite understood how the FM reception was so decent considering there was no external antenna of any sort.
The rear of the converter looks like an 8 Track cartridge minus the magnetic tape.
Taking a closer look at this particular FUTURA brand converter, I’m impressed with the number of features on such a compact front end:
- Analog FM dial
- Red LED stereo tuning indicator
- AFC OFF/ON switch
- DX/Local switch
- A wide, vertically-oriented tuning knob
I’m curious: how many Post readers had an 8 track FM radio converter in their vehicle? Or, did you ever have an Audio Cassette to 8 Track converter? Please comment! Also, you should check out some of the comments from our previous post.
And thanks for being sports about my “Mystery radio challenge“–I knew savvy Post readers would ID this tuner in no time!