It took me a while to make sense of this, and realize it's an AM (Mediumwave)-only radio. No frequencies, just call letters!
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Unusual Australian radio dial
- Thread starter kevtronics
- Start date
Wonder if @leethalweapon recognizes any of these stations….
I recognise a lot of those. Some have evolved, some disappeared.
New Zealand has a similar system.
At the time that the radio was built, Australia has 10 kHz increments just like the US. They much later changed to the 9 kHz interval system used outside the Americas.
This happened in 1978.
The other thing you will notice is all the ABC (Local) capital city stations were, and still are located between 567 anf 1026, as these were clearer signals.
Some Australian radio history for you all
Also note that the commercial stations were limited to 5000 watts while the ABC stations were allowed much higher power.
Never been to Oz, but I am fairly well acquainted with their media. I recognise a few of the calls on the dial: 6IX (pop/rock station in Perth in the 60s/70s), 6KY (I think they were Top 40 at one time, as they ran Casey Kasem), 6WF/6WN (ABC Stations in Western Australia), 3KZ (I think they were a Melbourne pop station?), same with 2UW in Sydney.
Pretty cool to see on a radio. Odd to not see any frequencies on the dial anywhere, though.
Pretty cool to see on a radio. Odd to not see any frequencies on the dial anywhere, though.
The lower frequencies are on the right. Normally the lower frequencies are on the left, regardless of 9 vs 10 khz intervals.
Not always. In the earlier days of radio, many receivers went from the shortest wavelength to the longest, not the other way around. In fact, some radio had neither wavelength nor frequency... just a scale. People bought logbooks where they could put their dial setting(s) to find the station again.
RADIO LOG BOOKS - Radio station logbooks and listings from 1923 to 2022.
White's, Stevenson's and others: Complete lists of radio stations by call letters, frequency and city for stations in the US, Canada and Mexico
www.worldradiohistory.com
Depends on how the tuning capacitor(s) were built or wired. I remember a few transistor radios in the 1960s that tuned "backwards." There weren't many, but there were some.
Not common in the U.S. but decades ago wavelength was widely used to denote a station’s place on the radio spectrum. This was especially true on shortwave; I recall in the 1960s and 70s that SW stations would use both frequency and wavelength in their transmission announcements. This pretty much disappeared sometime in the 1980s with frequency becoming the standard, although “meter bands” would give a general reference along with specific frequencies.
Scales for radio dials were common in the 1920s. There were a few receivers that continued that practice in the 1930s and 40s; I recall using a National HRO receiver from 1945 that had swappable coils and moving scale numbers in slots on a large dial. There were “curved line” charts provided with the receiver for converting those numbers into frequencies.
The first transistor radio I bought as a kid with my own money was a Sears Silvertone model 4201, and it had the “backward” dial. That was in 1964. A few years later my grandparents passed down a GE model P-725A from 1957 that also had the “backward” tuner on the side of the radio.
But you are right, most transistor radios had the “clockwise=higher frequency” design.
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