1968 Zenith AM Table Set

[radiotvnut]

Originally Posted by drh4683

Thats a neat radio. I never saw that one before. Yes, it is indeed a '68 model by production, but it uses a chassis introduced first in 1966.

As for the last tube type zenith radio, 1969 was the last year with the model Z316, which is a very plain basic AM FM table radio. One of my personal favorite zenith radios happens to be their first solid state set form '66. They are hard to find in nice shape. Its a model N890 which had two individual side by side slide rule dials for AM and FM. That was a great radio and every one I've ever found was beat to hell.

I've been wanting one of those N890's myself. Mainly due to an article I read in ARC about handwired solid state AC radios and this Zenith is one of them. I did, however, run across a '67 white plastic Zenith AM/FM "x" line clock radio with a hand wired chassis w/ socketed transistors. I suspect Zenith was probably the only company that made a non-PC board AC only solid state radio. I did see an N890 on ebay a long time ago; but, it was way overpriced and looked like it had been run over by a Mack truck.

[AUdubon5425]

I just want to add that I've researched some advertisements through Google's News Archive Search to see if Zenith made a large solid state table radio. As far as I can tell any AM table radios after this one were all smaller - the size of a standard alarm clock. These include the Z212 ('69) and the E210 ('74.)

[Jeffhs]

Zenith had an AM/FM stereo clock radio in the early 1980s, model H480W, solid state and quite large. I have one, works well on AM but extremely weak on FM. The trouble started immediately after I cleaned the slide pots. I think I must have been in too much of a hurry to test the set after spraying the controls; some of the stuff must have leaked onto one of the FM circuit boards and shorted a transistor or an IC (this radio has only one IC that I can see, the stereo FM decoder). Never did find the problem. What puzzles me is why I'm getting any reception at all on FM after the mishap (you can hear some very weak sound on FM with the volume all the way up, with a slight hum in the background) -- if that spray damaged the FM circuits, I would have thought it would have killed the entire section so that all I would hear would be...silence.

For Ryan (AUdubon5425): Zenith began to shrink its radios, I think, in the mid-1970s as you noted. The company had begun to manufacture its radios offshore by that time; by then large radios were going out of style in favor of table models. I'll have to look in that Google archive myself, as I'm curious to see just how small Zenith's radios became before the company got out of the radio business in the early '80s. I probably won't be too surprised, however, if I do find some very small sets, as by the '80s radio manufacturers were making widespread use of ICs; it probably wasn't too long afterward that companies with names no one on these shores ever heard of were turning out radios in which the entire set was on one chip. I once had a Radio Shack "Flavoradio" which might have been a one-chip design; never did look inside the thing to see how it was made. I also have a belt-clip stereo-FM scanning radio that I am almost sure must have been designed the same way. The radio is in a very slim case with the belt clip on the back, so I cannot imagine this set having been built using discrete components; the single IC (if there is one) that contains the entire radio may be on a small board as slim as is the case. As small and skinny as this radio is, it would not surprise me one bit if it is a so-called one-chip gutless wonder; however, mine seems to do a decent job picking up Cleveland FM stations using just the headphone cord as an antenna.

[peverett]

If you are interested in a company that designs and sells the single chip FM receivers, check out the Silicon Labs website.

http://www.silabs.com/products/Pages/default.aspx

The design center and company headquarters are based in Austin, Texas, my hometown. I am not sure where the chips are actually fabricated.