This was a most unusual early radio design

Did they really have a replacement technology in the 60's? I thought they had those mechanical tuner buttons in late 70's cars. Actually I don't remember exactly when they went to PLL's. Early 80's?

Ron Treadway and I made the first practical PLL chip set ~1968. I really don't know when it made it to consumer products. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Somewhere around there - mechanical pushbuttons in a '78 Olds, electronic in an '84.

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Grizzly H.

I had a Philips car radio back in 1964 which had that type of push button 'memory' tuning, using slug tuned coils.

Also was one of the first where you could pull the entire radio out of the car cradle and use it as a stand-alone portable. Neat.

Software Defined Radio SDR

Usually you could retune, then pull and set the pushbutton again, and it would asymptoticly approach correct memory. With the one I played with in 1975 or so, anyhow.

Look online for the schematic of the little Bao Feng UV-5R dual-band (VHF/UHF) ham radio hand-helds. I found it here:

Around $40 for an almost fully-digital transceiver. It has almost all of the radio in one mostly-digital chip, and a microprocessor to control it.

It can also receive the FM broadcast band at 88-108 MHz

** RF coils and IF transformers become much smaller by using core materials like ferrite to increase inductance. They got a whole lot smaller again when transistor circuitry eliminated the need to tolerate high voltages.

There was really no down side, as Q factors and self resonance frequencies both went up.

Ferrite rods also allowed AM receiver antennas to shrink a lot too.

.... Phil

Did it look something like this?

It's funny that I just looked at this site earlier today, before you posted this. I never knew they made these cradled/portable car radios until reading that website.

That site has so many things that are really fascinating. I've been going thru all the categories for several days now. It really fun reading!

One thing I learned from this site is how costly transistors were when they first went into use. One article said that a complete tube radio would cost $20 in the mid 50's, and ONE transistor cost about the same price. (With the average transistor radio using at least 5 transistors). So, an early transistor radio would cost hundreds of dollars.

What they did not say, is why a transistor cost so much. I'm only going to take a guess that each one had to be manufactured by hand... ???

Then I had to think how many billions of transistors exist inside of a modern computer, and they are mostly all crammed into a few small chips. (I think I'll hang up a 1950s calendar and sse if I can sell my computer for twenty billion dollars..... OR maybe fifty billion) :)

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Les Cargill

R&D, far from optimised processes produced a lot of duds & out of spec, all done on now ancient machinery, much by hand, very low volume production, and of course the cost to equip a factory.

Early tr radios were widely described by their number of transistors. At least one manufacturer cheated by soldering some completely dud trs onto the pcb so they could name it as if it had more trs - which it sort of did.

I have an old radio that proudly proclaims 'transistor' on the case. It does have one, but all the other stages are valve.

NT

And then there was the GM Wonder Bar

At one time in the UK, you needed a licence for a fixed radio installation but not for a portable, so what you describe above became popular.

Cheers

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Syd

Indeed an example of an SDR based transceiver. Software instead of coils.

However, when you want to buy one of these, don't get the UV-5R but instead get a UV-B5 or a GT-3 mk2 or mk3. These work much better for about the same price.

(for some reason, everybody is buying the older UV-5R design)

Not me, I won it as a door prize. Surprisingly good though, even by comparison with the Yaesu FT-60 that I paid for.

I have both a UV-5R and a UV-B5 and I can assure the latter is much better and is on par with those classical Yaesu/Icom/Kenwood handhelds. Others tell me the GT-3 mk2 is also very good, and in fact better than the new Yaesu Fusion portable in FM mode.

When I connect my UV-5R to the roof multiband omni, I receive nothing. This is because it is saturated with strong signals outside the amateur bands. When I connect the UV-B5 to the same antenna it works perfectly and I receive the same signals as with an ordinary transceiver.

It is also nice that it has a rotary encoder for manual tuning.

Naaaah! Software/ASIC instead of an IF and demodulation. And a piss-pot of frontend components.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

The RDA1846 ASIC contains two mixers that mix the input frequency directly to baseband in quadrature, 2 A/D converters and a DSP implementing the the passband filter and FM demodulation algorithm.

To me, that is an SDR. The transmitter does not use SDR, it is just a synthesizer with modulation forced on the VCO.