Did you know that the Realistic dx440 and dx390 are made by Sanjean.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Kim Kline" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 9:45 PM
Subject: Re: USB to Serial With a Laptop


> Hi.
>
> My first horror story with Radio Shack goes back to the Realistic
> DX-300General Coverage Communications Receiver.  I returned the first one
> within 24 hours, wanting my money back after I saw how bad the front end
> was and the fact that they wired the battery cradle backwards.  The store
> manager refused to give me my money back, and would only allow me to
> exchange it for another receiver.  Apparently in 1979 when I bought the
> radio, all sales over a certain dollar amount were final, no refunds.  So,
> I took the second receiver home.  It was better than the original
receiver,
> but it was still a piece of garbage, with intermod and garbage galore, and
> if you used a single wire antenna on the wire terminals the front end
> saturated on medium wave and around the 49 meter band big time.  The RF
> attenuator only worked on the coax connecter, so I made up a little jumper
> with a PL259 on one end, and an alligator clip on the other end.  I just
> ran my random wire antenna in through the coax connector.  I also learned
> that off tuning the preselector would sometimes roll back the sensitivity
> to the point that I could tame down an overpowering station.
>
> Anyway, I started to run into problems with a self oscillation in the
> receiver front end, and back to the store it went.  They sent it in for
> repair, and it came back and worked for a few weeks (all they did was
> realign it), and then the LSB mode quit working.  By this time I was about
> 2 months from the end of the warranty, and they wanted to give me still
> another receiver.  I figured that if this one was as much of a problem as
> the first two, I would be stuck with it.  They also offered to give me a
> credit towards the purchase of the DX302 which was going to be released
soon.
>
> Well, like our friend with the scanner, I decided to make a ruckus about
it
> in a croweded store on a Friday night, and threatened the store with legal
> action if my money wasn't refunded promptly.
>
> But, the crowning glory was that I got a hold of the district manager's
> phone number and gave him an earfull at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday
> morning.  The local store called me at about 10:00 a.m. that same morning
> and told me to bring in the receiver with all acc4essories and my sales
> receipt and they would refund my money.
>
> I avoided purchasing major pieces of equipment from Radio Shack for a
> number of years because of that incident, relenting in the late 1980's to
> buy a PRO2020 scanner, which actually was a halfway decent scanner, and
the
> Realistic DX440, which was a great FM receiver, but the MW/SW reception
was
> still crap.
>
> I presently still have the Realistic DX390 receiver, which is actually a
> reasonable receiver, ignoring the flimsy headphone and antenna connectors
> which I never use anyway.
>
> That is my horror story with Radio Shack.
>
> I do have to say, though, that I miss their Tandy brand of computers.
True
> that some of them were turkeys, but I caught a couple of them on sale that
> were very solid performing computers.  I had a Tandy 1000RL with a 40MB
> hard drive, the upgrade to 768KB of RAM, and the clock chip.  For a DOS
> machine in a ham shack, it was a great little machine.  It was very well
> shielded, so radio noise was virtually nil, and it had a small foot print
> which suited the available space in my ham shack.  And, I got it on
> closeout for $399!
>
> The other computer that I bought from them was a 386SX 33MHz machine that
> had a 106 MB hard drive and 2 MB of RAM which I expanded to 4 MB to make
> Windows 3.1 run better.  That machine had a double enclosure around the
> main board and the expansion cards, and as you might expect with that much
> metal around the guts of the machine, it was also quiet from a radio
> standpoint.
>
> Those were great machines.
>
> But, I think the purchase that I liked the best was the HTX202.  I liked
> that radio because it had the toughest front end of any HT that I've ever
> carried through downtown Rochester.  I think they hit a home run with that
> one, and I was sorry to see them discontinue it, especially since the
> radios that they followed up with weren't nearly as well designed.
>
> But, it seems like when they get a good product, they usually end up
> discontinuing it about the time you want to go buy one.  I was going to
> pick up their CD recorder after I finished paying for the new roof that I
> put on the house this summer.  Yep, you guessed it!  They discontinued it,
> and didn't replace it with anything equivalent.  I'm still looking for a
CD
> recorder.
>
> 73, de Lou K2LKK
>
>
>
> Louis Kim Kline
> A.R.S. K2LKK
> Home e-mail:  [log in to unmask]
> Work e-mail:  [log in to unmask]
> Work Telephone:  (585) 697-5753
>