Uh, does anyone here in North America have any experience in tuning American or Canadian AM radio stations -- with a digital tuner set and adjusted for European use? Seeing a digital-tuning, European-market boombox in "Very Good" or "Mint" condition might be tempting to go after. But their digital tuners are calibrated for radio stations that, by law, transmit in frequencies such as 522 kHz (pretty much the start of the AM or MW [medium wave] band), 1089 kHz ("Talksport") and 1332 kHz (Premier Christian Radio). Whereas radio stations here in the United States and further north in Canada always transmit MW programming in frequencies rounded to the nearest 10 kHz, such as 540 kHz (for instance, WFLF in Pine Hills, Florida), 990 kHz (for instance, CBQF in the Yukon, Canada) and 1170 kHz (for instance, WGMP in Montgomery, Alabama). Now, the mathematical difference between 930 and 927 is quite small: only three. But, when dealing with radio station frequencies, the difference between 930 kHz (what a North America-calibrated digital tuner will "land on" in coarse-tuning mode) and 927 kHz (what a Europe-calibrated model will tune) could be the difference between satisfying listening and "unlistenable noise," as at least one Stereo Review magazine issue in the 1990s put it (concerning opinions on recorded-music quality). One could go from truly agreeing with a talk-radio commentator ("That's right, Bob: taxation is a jobs-killer") to obnoxiously co-opting the speakers' statements ("You're darn right, Bob! So stupid of me to buy that European-market boombox just 'cause it was in pretty good shape. Now I can't listen real good to AM 'nless it's beaming on five-forty k-H-z, six-thirty k-H-z, nine-ninety k-H-z an' all that stuff. You know -- radio stations beaming on frequencies that happen to be end-in-zero multiples of 9 kHz, the fixed tuning steps of low- to moderate-cost, non-receiver European-market tuners! What was I thinking?") So, I wonder, folks: anyone on Stereo2Go with firsthand (and maybe ongoing) experience tuning American or Canadian AM radio with a European-market digital-tuner boombox? What’s it like?
I would have a good look at the instructions as many radios can be switched to either spacing. There was a discussion about switching a Walkman recently. It turned out there was a switch inside the cassette door. On a Tecsun PL390 radio I have we recently wondered why the temperature display had started showing Farenhight instead of Centigrade. It turned out that temperature format was linked to the MW spacing which had accidentally been switched from 9KHz to !0KHz.
My car had a European AM Radio. After some searching I found that it could be switched by pressing different buttons but before I figured that out I could get 60% of the US stations but some were not dialed in perfectly so they would have some static.
It depends on both the implementation and what you are trying to do with the radio. The big advantage of digital tuning is that presets can be implemented far more easily and better than with analogue tuning. It would be very difficult to implement a radio scanner (Bearcat style) without using digital tuning. A disadvantage is that frequency synthesizers often generate spurious signals which will interfere with certain frequencies. Where analogue tuning excels is when you want to tune up and down a band like shortwave looking for new stations. Flywheel tuning, implemented on expensive Shortwave radios and Hi-Fi means you can spin the tuning knob and grab it to stop if you hear something interesting. Manufacturers spent years trying to get the same effect using digital tuning, a common complaint being Chuffing noises as you move the tuning, as it is working in discrete steps and takes a time to adjust to each one. I sold my Sony ICF-SW77 because of that. P.S In the first half of the Eighties there were quite a few Boomboxes with an Analogue Tuner but a Digital display. While more accurate than a pointer on a piece of string they are still really analogue.
