The AM Forum

Shady O'Rack, known for cellphones, is getting out of the consumer digital AM/FM receiver market, according to a broadcast website.

Source: http://www.thebdr.net/articles/haps.html

Hi Paul,
It amazes me that they are still even in business!  Products that they sell seem to have no cost advantage over the competition.  I am anxious to see what will be the outcome of the most recent survey they conducted.

I guess the plus is, if you want an HD radio now is the time to pick one up on clearance. 

Joe, W3GMS     

..the stores have been gone from canada fer abt 8 yrs now..dont miss them...

..sk..

Ah yes, you mean "Telephone Shack"  ;D

"You have questions, we have blank stares"   :o  ;D  ;D  ;D

..frank..i still refer to any sales clerk, in any store, be it automotive, garden centre, etc., as giving you "the radio shack stare"...

..sk..

Tim,
      Not to mention getting you address and phone number for every item sold, so they could bombard you with advertisement and sell your info to other companies.

I severely cussed out one of the store clerks some years back because he wanted all of my personal info for a $.59 cash sale! ! !   ::)

Hybrid Digital (HD) radio appear just about ready to follow C-QUAM AM stereo and Quadraphonic Stereo broadcasting to the scrap heap of history. All the systems worked, just that they all have failed in the market place. iBiquity has not done anything to help push their system by keeping the algorithms a "Trade Secret" and having high licensing fees for the encoders and decoders unlike digital television where things like ATSC publishes there material for everyone to use and many produce encoders and decoders for digital television but  iBiquity  wanted to keep all the money for themselves. The delays in programming audio, the never ending fees and profit sharing schemes with iBiquity and the cost and complexities involved in transmitting all make me glad to see it go.
Ray F.

quad stereo would have been great, but i never met anyone with 4 ears...

..sk..

I wonder how often RS bashers even go into one of their stores.   I went into one here yesterday and came out with an 8 inch x 6 inch piece of breadboard for three bucks.  I also got a project box for $6.   Maybe these prices are not flea market specials but RS isn't a charity and if you need a project box right now you don't mind paying $6. 

If Radio Shack goes it will signal the end of the world as we know it.

Woe is he who had Radio Shack and lost.

Back when Radio Shack used to stock parts, going there instead of a real electronics parts store was like going to a corner Kwik-Stop when the supermarket is closed or too far away to travel to purchase one 59¢ item. They could often get you out of a jam and avoid having to wait till Monday morning to get the one little part needed to complete a project. Problem is, the local one here has phased out practically all their components like capacitors, resistors, voltage regulator chips, terminal strips, etc.  The last time I bought anything there was when I picked up a 1/4" stereo headphone male and female set. I got the last ones in stock and the guy said they were phasing them out, and when everything in that drawer was  sold out they probably wouldn't  re-order any more. While I was there, I did pick up for $15 a Texas Instruments scientific calculator that was on close-out.

Years ago, R-S used to be a full-fledged parts store, just like the old LaFayette Radio in Boston and Allied Radio in Chicago.  Their ads can be seen in many of the 30s-50s ham and electronics magazines. As they gradually shifted to "consumer electronics" gadgets, their parts stock dwindled. As late as the 70s, I purchased stuff like copperweld antenna wire and a set of rf coils and i.f. transformers designed to go in a transistor radio, plus they had a line of tubes (lifetime guaranteed) and a small selection of common transistors.

The only time I can remember really being pissed off at R-S to the point of wanting to punch someone out, was the time they refused to take a pocket full of quarters I tried to use to pay for some $4 item I needed at 6 PM, and didn't have any other cash with me and at that time, no debit card. The manager said they "had no place to put" my quarters and the cash register wouldn't hold that many.

I just accept R-S for what they are; I wouldn't routinely go to R-S to purchase the parts for my building projects any more than I would rent a room at Red Roof Inn or Wingate by Wyndham for a permanent residence.  And I am totally familiar with the "Radio Shack Stare".

I have a Sony HD radio here in the office that's on all day long. Wide assortment of additional music channels that weren't available for free when HD radio wasn't here. Also have Sangean HD tuner hung on the Hi-Fi 4 channel system down in the shack man-space. It's generally far more entertaining then listening to summer static on the ham bands.

IBiquity offers a digital channel that mirrors a stations analog channel on FM, that’s why you have to introduce a seven second delay on your analog to allow it to be in sync with the digital, a fact that makes trying to do real-time off air monitoring imposable for the air staff and creates difficulties in things like sports casting or live remotes. Then they give you a 9.6 kB second channel for alternate programming and other then the digital simulcast of your analog and a low bandwidth second channel you don’t get a lot. Have no experience with the AM system but would wonder if they can provide a second program stream with that. The quality is not what many had said it would be and I have always reminded people its Hybrid Digital and not High Definition like the improvements that were brought about in television. Being that I had to suffer thru implementation of a system I have a distorted view of the system and iBiquity in particular so my mind is damaged and would be glad to see it go before management tells me that it's to be installed on the other stations in the market. Fortunately management is all obsessed with internet streaming radio and has forgotten about HD so I may have lucked out this time. One of the two or three things I can count as accomplishments in my life was installing a C-Quam AM stereo system on a 5 kW directional station and getting it to work correctly. AM stereo worked surprising well and at one time the decoder was installed in many if not all Chrysler and Dodge cars but that appears to be over now. When the FCC expanded the AM band the requirements for all expanded band stations was for them to be 10 kW day, 1 kW night, omnidirectional signal tower and all C-Quam AM stereo. Wonder what happened with AM stereo?
Ray F

I asked for some obscure part at a small radio shack store and the manager went into the back and came out with a huge box just filled with the stuff they no longer sell. I'm still buying things out of that box from time to time. It may be a good idea to see what your local shack has in the back room ;D ;D ;D



I noticed that many of their employes have bad breath??

Parts more expensive - yea
sometimes questionable quality
but less than 1 mile from my house, on the way home from work and they still have several large chests of drawers full of general parts.  If I was building Solid State stuff they would be OK fine, and aside from the capacitors being 50 volts or less, they do ok.  Fets, audio amp chips, and Op Amps plus resistors, connectors, wire, solder & Irons and other tools. 

Like I said, not stellar quality, but in a jamn it works FB.

I DO hate their RF connectors, what ever plating they use does not take solder well. I sand it clean and use liquid flux and that work FB.

They have a SW radio antenna kit, with insulators and bare copper wire for the aerial and some insulated for the lead in... 

obscure part...let me guess...a fuse?...metal both ends, glass in the middle?...

..sk..

C-QAM was better.

Cause and effect. $300 insult pricing for a crappy Chinese radio with the $299 chip and the $1 innards and speaker is ridiculous. What did they think that people are so stupid they'd all pay for that?

Now, can I have the 4-5KC analog material back in the analog sidebands please?

It's a good line, Tim, but in case you're serious, the extra information takes advantage of the differential ability of the two ears to establish direction. Each ear can take multiple sources of sound to portray the spatial dimensions of near, far, left / right and so on, that are not as clearly defined with only two points of origination.

I've had experience listening to 4 channel LP records, and 4 channel tape playback into a 4 point loudspeaker setup, and I can really compare it to impressions today of "3D" movies and HD television.

paul, i recall a friend with a quad set-up, about 1975...he gad this BTO album, that was quad...it was impressive...

..sk..

I suspect IBiquity quietly hoped the public would confuse "High Definition" with Hybrid Digital, and associate the improvement in the TV image with the alleged improvement audio quality that may or may not exist.

Problem is, most of the public doesn't really care all that much about audio quality beyond a certain minimal degree. MP3 doesn't sound as good as a CD or an undamaged vinyl record, but with the exception of a few audiophiles, the public has fully embraced MP3 for the convenience of storing a lot of music in a small portable gadget, usually equipped with a crappy little speaker or ear buds.

I still have several(don't remember the count) CD-4 LP records in great shape. They required the use of a Shibata stylus in a high end cartridge to pick up the 45 KHz carrier signal for the rear channels. Just received a replacement belt for my Philips GA-212 turntable so it's now back up and running. I think I'll mount the cartridge and get the CD-4 demodulator wired in and pull out those LP's and see how they still sound. I seem to remember the last time this was up and running, I played the Doors, Riders On the Storm, 4 channel LP, and it sounded like I was right in the middle of the action.

Face it, Pete!  You're a gadget freak, with a document library back to before your own time. ;)




Free humor de W7TFO, not valid with any other offers or in Kansas.

 

I sure love my surround sound and I only have two ears.

You should hear 75 meters through a pair of 4 channel headphones.  ;D

Yeah they came into quite a bit of ridicule and some accusations of deception in using the letters "HD," although they publicly denied anything intentional.  Yet they eventually buried marketing references to "Hybrid Digital," just letting "HD" be interpreted in whatever way would happen.

The continued acceptance of MP3 as a convenient storage medium baffles me, because storage capacity now can handle uncompressed, high quality sound files in the same physical package. 

Earlier, (1968 ?) the low quality hissette came into widespread consumer acceptance, for much the same reason MP3 caught on -- convenient packaging, use, and distribution. Yet, audiophiles, musicians, and recording studios remained loyal for many years to the open-reel tape system as their definitive medium.

i prefer ogg vorbis over MP3, sounds better than mp3 audio, even at a lower bit rate than mp3, i can have a 70 kb ogg recording and a 128 kb mp3 recording and the ogg file sounds just as good if not better than the mp3, and is only about half the size of an mp3 file.

I am painfully familiar with the "Radio Shack Stare."  I'm trying real hard never to go back to a RS store.  When they stop selling 3AG fuses, that will be "it" for me

Radio Shack, I remember the good old days when I was but a young JN, and my dad would bring me Science Fair kits from there. Loved those little red plastic perfboards, learned a lot.

My local Radio Shack is but a ghost of itself, as someone mentioned, telephones and cheap TVs are what they thrive on. Used to be batteries, remember the Radio Shack battery cards of old?

I knew the end was near when my local RS started selling...CANDY BARS...right in the store, a small rack by the counter. Can't find an ceramic antenna insulator, but no problem with the Clark bars!

Even the smell of the place has changed.

Back in 1971, when I got a DX-150A receiver, there was a wonderful electronic sort of smell, and it was consistent regardless of what store you visited. It was a mix of vapors from the various plastics used in their Japan-sourced stuff, I'm sure.  

A warm DX-150A can still provide a representative sample of what the whole store smelled like.

Gad, these days, when I go there to get some solder (per Dave's endorsement), it's got this Wal-Mart kind of odor, probably from the candy bars that I didn't notice, but also from the toy electric cars, cellphones, and other gew-gaws¹ mixed with stuff dumped on the carpets from kids looking for video games or whatever.

Battery cards !  Yes !

One of the reasons I visited multiple stores (all with the same aroma) was to work multiple free battery cards and keep flashlights and radios filled with D-Cells.  I still have a collection of them, down to the last vacant month, with various stores and addresses on the front.  One even has a catalog number for the round 9V cell listed among the available freebies. Who remembers them?  We had a Magnavox transistor radio that took that one.

---

¹World English Dictionary
gewgaw  (ˈɡjuːɡɔː, ˈɡuː-)
 
— n
1.    a showy but valueless trinket
 
— adj
2.    showy and valueless; gaudy

I have seen articles in reputable magazines and newspapers, and heard announcers on radio stations, including NPR, refer to HD Radio as "High Definition Radio" whatever that would suppose to mean.  Of course, IBiquity hopes the Joe Bloe public will make an erroneous association with the high definition TV image, which would be about as closely associated with radio as Florida oranges are to wirewound resistors.

I understand that "HD Radio" is now listed as a trade mark, one of those meaningless combinations of letters in a brand name, like KFC and AAA, which no longer legally carry any further meaning, although they once respectively stood for "Kentucky Fried Chicken" and "American Automobile Association".

Ibiquity, the companies that manufacture the gear, and field engineers like me are the only people that make money from HD IBOC radio.

The station owners find it a money pit, but do it 'to keep up with the Joneses'

I take their $$, but I feel I'm doing no one a service by setting it up.

Lots of AM stations are retiring it already because of nighttime nightmares.

73DG

Now that TV has gone digital, and as it turns out, VHF doesn't work very well for the chosen digital transmission standard, the FCC should go ahead with the proposal to convert channels 5 & 6 to an expansion of the FM broadcast band. They could allow stations use those frequencies for signals 100% digital, and leave the original channel frequencies analogue only, and forget about that "hybrid" nonsense . After a few years, shut down either the analogue or digital channel once it was determined that listenership to one or the other had dwindled to the point that it was no longer cost effective to keep on transmitting both, just as the Swedish LW BC station closed down.

Channel 2 and 3 are taking up space formerly used for the 5 metre band.

Radio Shack solder has saved more than one stranded traveler.

It may have even been used in outer space. One never knows.

A little more off-topic.........the HD seemed to benefit FM more. Another high quality channel and did not cause a ruckus in the RF world. The AM is amazing, except at night. I never heard any music cuz of AM talking-sports-news, etc etc endlessly

i've saw this (i believe) on here before and i'm going to repeat because i agree: digital on AM BC should be daytime only., at night it wipes out a station's adjacent channels, i can't even hear KDKA on 1020 anymore because of WBZ's digital crap up on 1030.

I found them !!!
ALL of them !!

Wonder if they still have it going on.

The punched holes say, "No, no no- expired".

They used to sell a "5-D Cell Flashlight" too, so there was the one free battery, and the others came in packs of two. It was a pretty good light for a plastic thing.

Sorry to bring this back up.
BUT I went to my local "Shack" store and they said that RS was not abandoning the electronic parts business. In fact they were going to expand it.
I would hate to have to start ordering fuses and indicator lamps from eBay or Amazon

I do a lot of on-line ordering from places like McMaster-Carr. They usually have in stock what I am looking for, no matter how obscure, as long as it's something still being made, such as oddball sizes of hardware and low-demand items like speciality tools and odd-ball metal stock. With M-C, the item usually arrives the third day after I ordered it. Usually the stuff I order on-line is pure unobtanium in the local stores, which increasingly cater only to high-volume sales.

A far cry from the pre-internet and pre-plastic days when you had to browse through multiple paper catalogues, send a MO to the vendor, wait several days for them to receive the order, several more days to process it, and then a week or more for the stuff to arrive. Often  a total wait time of 2-3 weeks or more; over a month was not unusual. Of course, back then local stores carried a wider variety of merchandise. On-line sales makes it a lot easier to complete a project (assuming the needed item can be had anywhere at all at any price).

Just like the dwindling genetic diversity in food crops, the variety of obtainable merchandise seems to be steadily in decline, except for worthless fluff.  Chances are if you bought a certain oddball size screw that was readily available 10 years ago, you will find that it has been "discontinued" if you try to purchase another one now. I have found that when working on the house, if I fall shy purchasing enough of a certain size piece of lumber, trim or hardware, start the project but let it slide over winter, that next spring when I go to purchase enough to complete the project, there is a good possibility that material identical to what I had used the previous year is no longer available, and I end up having to shim and trim to make what I can find this year fit together with what I bought last year. With wooden building materials, the newer product is often planed down to a slightly smaller size, and the quality is lower. To-day's #1 grade is yesterday's #2 grade.