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Why no shortwave band on radios?

I have lost count of the number of transistor (and IC) radios and Hi-Fis that have passed through my hands over the years. Some were high build quality but others were complete junk. What is common between them are that relatively few models have the facility to receive shortwave broadcasts. They only have LW, MW, and VHF bands.


Notable examples from the heyday of the transistor radio with a shortwave band include the Hacker Super Sovereign RP75, GEC G820, and Grundig Yacht Boy, but these were all top of the range models. Commercially available models of radios with a shortwave band at an affordable price to the average person were limited although there was the option of constructing one yourself or modifying an existing LW / MW radio.


What is the reason why so few transistor radios and Hi-Fi tuners had a shortwave band?

  • mapj1:

    And good quality SW reception requires more careful receiver design, both as tuning needs to be multi-octave, an a choice of IF frequency that is OK at MW may lead to spurious responses and lack of selectivity at the 20-30MHz end, and as the dynamic range of adjacent signals can be very high. It is not uncommon to want to extract a signal of a few hundred nanovolts RMS from under the skirts of an adjacent unwanted one at tens of millivolts RMS that may be 10-20kHz offset. For these reasons the common (=cheap) solution on a MW/LW set of  single tuned circuit prior to an unbalanced 1 transistor self oscillating mixer is not likely to be adequate, so attempts to extend an existing LW/MW design cheaply are usually a disaster.




    It's a fiddle but I have seen it done. RF transistors almost always need to be replaced by those which operate at a higher frequency. Parasitics can be problematic because the PCB is designed to operate at a lower frequency. The converted radio is usually intended to operate around the frequency of a particular radio station the user is interested in rather than attempting to cover the entire SW band. LW / MW radios were often converted into SW radios in countries where SW radios were difficult to obtain.



     

  • mapj1:


    Certainly, and I am old enough to recall the end of the cold war era, interference from faulty equipment and unlicenced radio broadcasts generally were much more strongly pursued at the time when HMG and every other country ran numbers stations ( the UK 'probably' transmitted The Lincolnshire Poacher from near Akrotiri ) out of military bases to (allegedly) provide a one way encrypted link to their field agents in other countries,  and one side effect of that attitude was that SW (HF) and MW/LW were far more useable than they are today.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnXPqUU6fI0

    Brings back memories!

    Clive