Short Wave Radio?

[Corvanti]

...as a dealer installed option on a '41 Commander? first i've heard of that - would be pretty cool though.

buried in the article, here's the link: http://www.hemmings.com/hcc/stories/..._feature2.html

[TWChamp]

I saw an ad for the Studebaker shortwave radio on ebay about 6 months ago. That was the first time I've heard of such a thing.
For a smaller car company, it's amazing what Studebaker had to offer in research, a quality car, and the number of accessories.

[studerex]

The survival of that short wave is amazing. I was selling at a local South Bend swap meet about 1980. A local fellow, a old Stude employee, came up and said he had some parts at home for sale. Phil Brown and I when to his house and bought his parts. In his bar room he had this short wave hooked up to a car radio and dc converter. His brother was the Philco factory rep to Studebaker. This guy had a 41 president that he totaled and his brother told him to get that short wave out before it was scrapped. He knew how rare it was even back then. Somewhere I have the factory accessory papers. Maybe Quinn will post it.

[8E45E]

I believe what Studebaker called the 'Airmaster' radio in 1942 was both AM, or 'BC' and shortwave.

Craig

[DEEPNHOCK]

While not a built in... My Dad had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic readio that had a neat removeable antenna that unscrewed from the lid and had little suction cups to stick the antenna to the car window. There was a dual power setup, so you could run it off the battery.
And it had all sorts of short wave band stuff with it.

[Commander55]

Jeff, I have one of those radios. It may be just a few years later model than that one. It is a cool radio and still works.

[Studebaker Wheel]

Short wave was available only in 1941 and 1942. In '42 they also offered a rear seat remote control. It was floor mounted button that allowed the rear seat passenger to select form any one of 5 pre-set stations. No, I have never seen one.

[autoradiotech]

In 41 and 42 any car company who bought their radios from Philco also had access to a 'short wave tuner' that would mount under the dash and plug into the normal radio. These also had knobs, etc, that matched the dash. If you look at the left side, near the top of 41 and 42 radios, you will see a 5 pin socket with a jumper wire in it. You remove the jumper and plug in the S.W. converter the normal radio has to be tuned to a certain frequency, 1400?, and then you tune stations in on the converter. Also in those two years, Buick and Chevrolet offered a short wave radio as an option and I have these models along with a converter for 46to 48 Fords and Mercs, these were made by Zenith and you had to have the "export" radio to use one.

[garyash]

The difficulty now is that there is nothing much to listen to on the shortwave broadcast bands. The Internet killed the big international transmission agencies, like BBC Overseas and Voice of America. I did pick up Radio Romania on the 41 meter band (7 Mhz) recently, loud and clear, but not much else. OK if you really like polka music.

[Corvanti]

thanks all.

i'd love to find one of these - but doubt i could find a working one at $19.95 per Mr. Quinn's attachment!

we had a "Voice of America" SW tower that i could see from the house here at the coast that went "down" in the last few years.

with the way things are going - tech wise - i'd think AM/FM "broadcasts" will be also going away in the next 10 to 15 years.

all digital - all the time!!!

[StudeNewby]

Shortwave is still in use, but mostly being shot into the third world. I worked in shortwave for a few years on Guam with Trans World Radio. They still have transmitters there aimed at Asia, South Asia and the South Pacific.

[Skip Lackie]

As noted above, shortwave is still around, but is largely now being directed at Africa and Southeast Asia where few have access to the Internet. The BBC, CBC, and most of the others broadcasting in English stopped transmitting to North America about ten years ago, but now put their content on the Web. I think the Australian Broadcasting Corporation SW broadcasts to the Pacific nations can still be received in North America in the morning. Both SW and what we call AM (most of the rest of the world calls it medium wave) use much of the same receiver circuitry (unlike FM) and can easily be packaged into the same radio, so many of those big tube-type console radios built in the 1930s came with both.

For many years, some models of Becker car radios came with both long wave (the frequencies below our AM band) and short wave (the frequencies above our AM band), as well as AM/FM. These came as original equipment in some Mercedes-Benz models. I picked up an NOS Becker Mexico at a flea market a few years ago and put it into my 95 Camaro. It's a very nice radio, but as noted, in North America there's no longer much to listen to on SW.

[garyash]

I wanted an old tube radio to show to my 9-year old grandson, try to get him interested in radio and electronics. He's been interested in making robots, etc. I soon wound up with an old "All American five" table radio but then I saw a big Emud (German) radio from 1957 with AM/FM/shortwave. It has 8 tubes including a "tuning eye". It will pick up short wave stations, and is the one that logged Radio Romania.

One thing lead to another, though, and I remembered how I had started with a Novice ham radio license back in high school, ca. 1959. I never progressed beyond that at the time. So, I went on line last month, found that you didn't need Morse code anymore for a license. I brushed up on the regulations and calculations, took the exams a couple of weeks ago, and now have an Amateur Extra class license, AB1XD. I bought a used Yaesu FT450D transceiver, which will receive everything from 30 KHz up to 56 MHz and transmits on the 160meter to 6 meter ham bands. It's small enough to fit under the dash in a car - if you have 22 amps at 13.8 volts available. I don't have the real antenna put up at the house yet, but a simple long wire pulls in a lot of stuff. Modern radios have much higher sensitivity and selectivity, more bells, whistles, and knobs than one can imagine. At least I can now hear the hams talk, even if the old-time BBC broadcasts are gone. When I get an antenna up next week, I'll be on the air myself. Then we'll see how interested my grandson is. We'll both have a lot to learn about shortwave radio.

[decappastubbie]

I have my grandfather's Trans-Oceanic, works great.

[Ken Stewart]

I have one of those in my garage. I got it at a flee market several years ago. Guess what my son works on radios in the navy and inside he found some old dirty pictures. We had a good laugh about that. I guess those radios were very commend back then.