{"id":58044,"date":"2023-10-22T06:30:48","date_gmt":"2023-10-22T10:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/?p=58044"},"modified":"2023-10-22T07:01:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-22T11:01:11","slug":"the-sony-icf-sw800-a-most-unusual-sony-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/the-sony-icf-sw800-a-most-unusual-sony-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sony ICF-SW800: A Most Unusual Sony Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to SWLing Post<\/em> contributor, Bill Hemphill (WD9EQD), who shares the following guest post:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A Most Unusual Sony Radio<\/h1>\n

By Bill Hemphill WD9EQD<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the years, I have owned many of the various Sony shortwave radios.\u00a0 From analog to digital, I would buy the latest and sell my current radio.\u00a0 For the past few years, I have been using mainly Tecsun radios and didn\u2019t own any Sony radios anymore. \u00a0 This changed last year.\u00a0 I got the urge to acquire a few of the Sony\u2019s that I remember so fondly.\u00a0 Over several months I bought off eBay four ICF-2010 (one of which works), two ICF-SW100 (one of which works), four ICF-SW1 (none of which works).\u00a0 After spending way too much money just to acquire two working Sony radios, I started realizing that any Sony radio was probably going to need re-capping \u2013 a chore which I am not skilled at.\u00a0 I could have saved money by just paying the high price for a radio that had already been completely re-capped and working.<\/p>\n

During the many hours spent watching eBay, I would occasionally come across a Sony radio that I was not familiar with \u2013 the Sony ICF-SW800.\u00a0 This is a very unusual radio in that it has only two bands \u2013 FM and SW.\u00a0 And the SW band only covers 3.7 to 17.9 MHz\u00a0 It also has these small credit card size pre-programmed memory cards.\u00a0 I ended up buying a couple of the radios just to learn what was going on with the memory cards.<\/p>\n

The radio is very plain and simple.\u00a0 Dull black plastic, telescoping antenna, nice flip out tilt stand on the back, very small LCD display that shows time when off or in stand-by and band (FM or SW), frequency and card Preset memory number when card is inserted.\u00a0 Following are photos of front of radio, without and with card inserted:<\/p>\n\n\t\t