Antique radio tuning dials

Antique radio tuning dials. [Indiana Radios via Coudal]

• [Donald Petersen]

  Gorgeous… what a lost art. The 21st century will miss the common household usage of such Thunderdomesque terms as “Superheterodyne” and “Megacycles.” Plus, #84 is a Syncratone, custom built by Gaylord. Definitely the product of a bygone century!

  I also like how the Truetone at #69 shows your common shortwave cities such as PARIS, MOSCOW, TOKIO, and NEW YORK… but has to abbreviate the longer names of COP’H'N, FRISCO, and that Broadcasting Capital of the Airwaves, SCH’N'DY.

• [nixiebunny]

  These things are works of art, and the web page is very pretty too. It must have taken a good bit of work to make those scans or photos.

  I like #9 for its beauty. I noticed that #59 and #60 are identical except for the typesetting – it’s lovely to click back and forth and watch the different fonts melt into each other.

• [zoink]

  Unfortunately, the pretty website is completely Flash-based and doesn’t seem to work in my (latest!) Flash player/FF combo.

  Love the tuning dials, though. Too bad I can only see the first 5 of them!

• [ikoino]

  Check out the Ochestrion speaker on his site: http://www.indianaradios.com/Orchestrion%20Deluxe%20Horn%20Speaker.htm

  Incredibly beautiful – I hesitate to call it steam punk because this thing was the real McCoy!

  Do stations still broadcast in shortwave anymore?

• [kip w]

  This makes me weep for the wood and bakelite radios I had to let go of. Oy.

  I like the one with the stations printed on the face. I used to listen to these stations at night, in Colorado, on a tube table radio a friend of my sister gave me. KMOX from St. Louis, WOR (too far away for me to get, but my friend says he got New York one time on his 16-transistor set. WHO in Des Moines, that used to play Lum ‘n’ Abner at 9 pm weeknights. KOA, the only Denver station I was ever able to pick up on the East Coast (once or twice – a local station usually knocked it out), and which I could pick up reliably in Houston. KLZ, another three-letter Denver station (until some idiots changed the name). KOMA from Oklahoma City. WOW, out of Omaha. WLS from Chicago, where Chuck Buell went after he left KIMN. WGN, the other Chicago station that came in sometimes.

  Radio Shack sold a book that listed all the radio and TV stations in North America, so if I mis-heard a call sign, I could correct it. I wrote down the ones I could get reliably. KOB in Albuquerque, KRLD in Dallas (who did a half hour of old-time radio every night after Garner Ted Armstrong), and quite a few that were only interesting because of their distance.

  I dreamed of the radio stations once. I was behind a large window, looking out into the snowy night, looking at tiny beacons. Each one was a radio station, glowing brighter as the signal was beamed my way, then dimming as they inevitably faded before coming back. Later on it occurred to me that this was a metaphor for fandom; everybody sending his or her signal out to the night owls who were sitting up to listen for it.