National Brand Shortwave/Mediumwave Receiver

ericjohn

Enlightened
Joined
Jul 12, 2011
Messages
575
Location
1 Alpha Louisiana
A friend of mine gave me various radio devices yesterday and the one I am enjoying most is a National R-305B.

I am guessing it was one of the budget type radios of back in the day.

Is it named after the now defunct National Grocer Chain?

Anyway this thing has beautiful, clean audio and can pull in stations that none of my [modern] radios can.

I'll dare say that a budget type radio made back in the day can outperform a budget radio made currently, especially for DXing.

Can anyone give me some details on this device, namely what year was it made?

Thanking everyone in advance...
 

mattheww50

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jun 24, 2003
Messages
1,048
Location
SW Pennsylvania
There are two 'Nationals'. There was National based in USA that built amateur radio receivers (Ham) through the 1960's. The equipment ranged from budget to some pretty high end gear, all vacuum tube. Most National Radio's were quite large and the model numbers have a NC prefix, such as NC-270 which was a reasonably sophisticated dual conversion radio. The other National is Panasonic. In some markets the products are known as National, or National Panasonic. There is an R-305 model built in the mid 1960's as a 3 band, 8 transistor radio. Assuming that is the radio The Audio is likely to be pretty good, it uses a push-pull audio output layout and has one more audio amplifier stage that was common for the era. Overall sensitivity is somewhat suspect as there is no Radio Frequency Amplifier stage and it is a single conversion receiver. It does appear to have a tuned 'front end' (which you usually don't find on budget radios), so it is likely to be better than most budget receivers of the era. While it probably is pretty good for what it is, it is not in the same league with the real Communications receivers of the day like the Collins 32S1 or RL Drake 2B. The question with budget radio's these days is how cheap can you make them. You can now get a complete AM band radio on a single chip. Some receivers are a lot better than others. Most AM radios sold in the USA in that era were based on what was referred to as the All America 5, which had 5 tubes, or a roughly equivalent 6 transistor design.
 
Last edited:
Top