My Short Wave Radio Story

A super quick primer on how I got back into short wave radio.

I was a typical 60’s and 70’s kid.  I loved CB radio and Short Wave radio even more.  After leaving home for the loving arms of the United States Navy I drifted away from my radio hobby.

Fast forward to the mid 2000’s and I am now working for the US Gov’t and living in Iwakuni Japan.  I was sent to MCAS Cherry Point in Havelock, NC.  And oddly enough, I live in this area now.  While I was driving around one day I had the AM radio on scan and it landed on a station that had minimal power and could only be received in parts of Havelock.  I have no clue what the station was.
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XHDATA D-608WB Review

XHDATA D-608WB

I love radios.  I can’t even say how many radios and short wave radios I own because my wife reads this.   However, I was tickled to death to find out that XHDATA was sending me their new D-608WB Emergency Radio ($33) to review.   It can also be purchased from Amazon.

I also own the original XHDATA D-608 and reviewed it previously here.   Like I said, I own a lot of radios.

Also, I own a lot of radios that call themselves Emergency Radios. So let’s see how the D-608WB shakes out.
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Radio.  It’s an interesting medium.  From Edison to Marconi it has been with us since the late 1800’s.  Among the first wireless, commercial transmissions were referred to as Marconi-grams.

Marconigram Mar*co“ni*gram, n. [Marconi + –gram.] same as {radiogram}; a wireless message. [Webster 1913 Suppl.]

Transmitting messages wirelessly became preferable over wired transmissions referred to as the telegraph.   In 1920 our world changed as KDKA, a government radio station was thrust upon the airwaves and commercial radio kicked off.   The BBC in England followed suit around 1922.

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Ok, I’m late to the show.  Really, really, really late to the show as this receiver has been out of production for a while.  I know.

While some of these aren’t my photos they are indeed photos from the eBay auction of the Icom IC-R75 receiver I bought so hopefully that’s okay.

I can give you specs and point you to all the features that you can easily look up yourself but I’m just going to focus on how I like the receiver.   Most of my reviews are subjective and basically boil down to “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.   I let others handle the super technical reviews.

While I am an electronics tech I’m mostly just a hobbyist, a user, and I know what I like, what makes sense, and what doesn’t work for me.  I’d be willing to bet that most people who are thinking about buying an R-75 don’t want to know how fast the electrons flow through the perfect waveform but rather the common sense nuts and bolts operation of the receiver.

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