No fun, really, looking at "pretty" tuners. It's more entertaining to look at and write about UGLY tuners.
This one is about as ugly as they get. It is so ugly that even though my brother still has one, I didn't want to ruin my camera taking a photo of it. So this photo was saved from a website (alexreeltoreel.com). Even so, the hard drive that I had when I saved it, has crapped out. Think maybe because this thing is so ugly?
It's ugly inside, as well as out.
It sounded...like garbage! That was when you could tune in a station cleanly, which definitely wasn't all the time. Its sensitivity was poor so it had to be used in a high signal-strength location. Mostly that meant a large metropolitan area but along with signal strength in such an area came multipath (the FM signal would reflect off buildings and appear delayed at the receiver). This thing was poor at rejecting weak interfering signals (lousy "capture ratio") and just as bad at rejecting multipath. Selectivity was poor so it had a hard time tuning in a station if there were another one or two broadcast channels adjacent. If there was a strong FM station nearby (where I lived in San Francisco there was a transmitter a half-mile away) it would appear a dozen times across the dial, seemingly right on top of the station you were trying to listen to.
It always seemed to be out-of-alignment. It was even a hot-chassis AC/DC set, like an old AM table radio. All the innards should have been wandering off alignment all the time. So, how did it keep enough alignment to stay in tune with itself?
It didn't. It would drift during warmup, drift while temperature was stable, drift if you bumped it, drift if you looked cross-eyed at it. A lot of tuners of the day relied on Automatic Frequency Control (AFC) which would automatically tweak the local oscillator to adjust for drift. But it probably would have cost twice as much to implement as it cost to BUILD this entire tuner.
There would have been no point, anyway. Even if you could get a station past its poor RF/IF stages, the audio sounded...like garbage!
Meet the
GRANCO FM TUNER!!!