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]
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Work Telephone:  (585) 697-5753