Roaring 20s Superhets

duanesradios.info

9 points·jhallenworld··8 comments

Superhets were pretty rare in the 1920s. All kinds of wacky and wonderful forms of tuning and amplification were used in that era of radio (as someone below mentioned, to avoid RCA patent infringement), and of course the aesthetics of the machines were top notch. Collected them for a while myself, though you rapidly run out of room for such hobbies.

Here's some eye candy for folks who are interested in the aesthetics of the era:

https://www.radioblvd.com/20sRadio.html

I like the Atwater Kent models 35 and above- they have the same controls as modern radios: a single dial for tuning even if they are TRF receivers.

Norman Rockwell had one:

http://wd4eui.com/Pictures/Antique_Radios/AK35_NRockwell.jpg

https://web.archive.org/web/20190819150125/http://www.duanes...

@dang it'd be great if we had an archive link to load the index of versions from archive.org

Is there any difference between a heterodyne receiver and a superheterodyne receiver?

Heterodyne is a signal processing technique, and superheterodyne is an application of that for radio tuning.

This video is a great explainer (and I also highly recommend every other video on the channel):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_mMLhUinw

"Superheterodyne" is a contraction of "supersonic heterodyne", where "supersonic" indicates frequencies above the range of human hearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver

The super means above hearing range. In a heterodyne receiver (if there was ever such a thing), you would hear the IF frequencies.

They were nearly all home built from kits to avoid RCA patents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com