That may have been the only Blaupunkt in a pickup truck. Which college?
-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
New Life for REELRADIO
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
That may have been the only Blaupunkt in a pickup truck. Which college?
I’ve seen those before online, but have never seen one in a Porsche, and I’ve been to a lot of Porsche specific car shows. I don’t know whether or not it was that popular of an option, and the guy I could’ve asked who worked on Porsches at dealerships since the 60s has passed away.
This says it was also an option in the 911S:
My dad had a 73 911 so I’ll ask him if it was an S and if he remembers ever seeing these radios when he was looking at 911 cars to buy in the late 70s/early 80s. Since he had a Marantz tape deck and stereo, I don’t think he cared about recording from the radio in his car.
Last edited:
Hayward, CA. The instructor was into stereos and stuff.
I have trouble using a flip phone, so a smart phone is out of the question.My friend John, who only switched to a smartphone a couple of years ago, now says flip phone users are the 21st Century equivalent of a Luddite.
For the Internet I need a mouse, a full size monitor and a real keyboard.
I remember wishing clear back in the '90s that somebody would offer a car radio with a record button. Now I know I just didn't look hard enough! The grief, the grief...
I blame my mom. If she'd just gotten me a Porsche for Christmas instead of socks...
Oh, but the grief won't end there. Soon, all we'll have are Carr radios with AM buttons.
I might have had the next best thing to that Blaupunkt: a car radio with a fader that didn't fit quite right into the dash, so the electrical contacts were exposed. Being what I believed to be a good radio news reporter, I knew how to use alligator clips. I used them with phones all the time, even GTE phones which were kind of tricky. Voila: attach the clips to the fader and plug the other end into a recorder. I made several recordings that way around 1980.
Later in the 1980s, I acquired a Proton 100 walkman-type receiver. The Proton was designed with home-stereo receiver specs, though the build quality was lacking. I would stick it on the dash and record off of it into a portable stereo recorder. The last time I did that was 1996, on a trip from Chicago back to St. Louis. (Little did I realize at the time that I would be moving to Chicago just five months later!) The challenge with the Proton was multipath. It was the first FM receiver with a Schotz detector and those seemed to be somewhat sensitive to multipath compared to something more basic.
Later in the 1980s, I acquired a Proton 100 walkman-type receiver. The Proton was designed with home-stereo receiver specs, though the build quality was lacking. I would stick it on the dash and record off of it into a portable stereo recorder. The last time I did that was 1996, on a trip from Chicago back to St. Louis. (Little did I realize at the time that I would be moving to Chicago just five months later!) The challenge with the Proton was multipath. It was the first FM receiver with a Schotz detector and those seemed to be somewhat sensitive to multipath compared to something more basic.
Oh, lord, won't you buy me
A Blaupunkt ster-e-o
A quick Google search didn't turn anything up, but I could swear a cassette recorder was a factory option in early 70s Mopar vehicles. ISTR it being separate from the radio, and mounted on the transmission hump.
As you noted, it would have been a boon for us aircheckers. Having been an electronics tech most of my adult life, I'd modify car radios and tap off audio ahead of the volume control for airchecking on road trips, etc. At first I used a battery-operated cassette deck, later on a component one powered from an inverter. Even wired up a remote with start/pause buttons in order to scope them.
You were not hallucinating.
I saw these in cars at the time---but I was under the impression that it played tapes and only recorded through the microphone---but. Look at the knob on the left and the record selector has "RADIO" and "MIC"----so I should have bought a Challenger or a Barracuda (cheaper than a Porsche).
Here's one actually installed in a 1972 Road Runner:
Found a Plymouth Satellite dealer info page on the option---apparently, even if your car had an AM/FM stereo along with the cassette deck, which played back in stereo, if you taped directly from the radio---even an FM stereo station, it was mono. Still---not the worst thing:
What I can't find is anyone with first-person experience on how well it worked...this was early for car cassette decks and the few friends I had who had them were usually cursing as the tape started pouring out the slot and onto the center console.
Most of the interest in these now is among people restoring Mopars of this era.
Last edited:
Don't have any first hand experience, but I'll also guess it was more a novelty than anything very useful.
The one and only new car I ever owned was a 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger I bought about a year after I graduated college (fun car...318 with a 4 speed...I think it was a special order that someone backed out on...good performance, and not bad on gas either). The AM-FM radio option was absurdly overpriced, so I just got the AM (besides, it was 1971 and there was very little worth listening to on FM at the time). 5-6 years later I found an AM-FM at a junkyard & replaced it. For about a month. The AM radio was great, good sensitivity and selectivity. The AM-FM one was neither...deaf as a stump on FM, and even the AM section was inferior to the original.
"Cheaper" in so many ways! (I could not resist the comparison of a Challenger with a Porsche).
An interesting piece on the history of the VersaBraille just showed up in my email box today, including one detail I forgot (you could only use 60-minute cassette tapes) and a couple of others that I knew nothing about at the time (most notably the Touch-Type thing in combination with the BBC).
Enjoy!
That's amazing. Did it not catch on because of how expensive it was or what?
That would be correct, and I'll say more about that in a moment. Also, by the time I got to play with the VersaBraille System, TeleSensory Systems had moved on and was using floppy disks and a new device (whose name I forget now) to accomplish the same things and more.
Now back to payments. Since a lot fewer blind and visually impaired people were working in the general economy back then (we didn't know how few until 1996 when the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky, published a research paper on the subject), you had to be involved in some way with the state's vocational agency or independently wealthy to purchase one of these items. In addition, since the portion of the population that used these machines was very small (.6% using the U.S.' legal definition of blindness which is 20/200 or worse and included a lot of people who could read large print), the number of people under the age of 65 who could actually benefit from using the VersaBraille was even tinier.
That's incredible. How much did one of those VersaBraille systems cost?
Since I got the one I used from the Arizona State vocational rehabilitation agency, I had to look it up.
$5250! And that was in 1980!
Because there was some discussion of the Internet Archive site on this thread, I think some of you may be interested in the below article which appeared in PC Mag.
www.pcmag.com
While this is not about radio in particular, it is interesting to note that Internet Archive is now considered a federal depository of information.
Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Library, Will Offer US Documents Online for Free
The platform gets its federal library designation as part of its mission to keep knowledge accessible for all, says founder Brewster Kahle.
While this is not about radio in particular, it is interesting to note that Internet Archive is now considered a federal depository of information.