Sony ICF-SW7600GR Multi Band World Receiver Radio: Who cares about DX listening?

[jebem]

(07-12-2015 08:17 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  

(07-12-2015 05:15 PM)jebem Wrote:  Who cares about DX listening?

I do! I do!
(...)
A few years ago, I decided to go back to "old school and picked up a couple of Panasonic RF-2200 Analog radios.

73, WD9EQD
Bill
Smithville, NJ

Thanks for sharing, Bill!
I knew at least one member here should have been into DXing.

I never was into serious amateur radio and never took the license, probably because I stared my professional work on telecommunications in 1975, working for RACAL, a large company at the time in South Africa with a manufacturing plant and technical support branch in Mozambique.

Once, in 1978, I was repairing a high power, short wave, long distance military RCA triodes tube equipped transmitter in the Niassa lake Metangula military naval base.
The power supply transformer was damaged and had to be rewind. I was there to install it and make sure the communications could be re-established to Maputo (about 2000Km away).

After the usual preparation steps, which included the pressurization of the transmission line, tuning all the pre-stages for minimum current and then fire up the output push-pull stage, checked the SWR ratios, I went decidedly to the morse key and started keying frenetically to see if the equipment could cope with the requirements.

Only then I realized that something was wrong.
All the personnel in the communication room (all of them Morse experts that used to do championships to see how fast they could send and decode messages) were looking to me with inquisitive faces.

And one of them, just asked me:
Comrade Mesquita, what the hell are you transmitting and to whom???

I had to explain that I didn't learn Morse properly and I was just doing my job at the electronics level.
I'm not a spy, honest!

But I still have a couple of radios from that era, that we used to listen to soccer matches broadcasted from Europe to whole world:
One National Panasonic RF-2800B and another Grundig Satellite 6001.
Both of them are stored away for more than 30 years in my parents home in North.
One of these days I will have to rescue them and see how good they were.