We know how [Techmoan] feels. In the 1980s we had a bewildering array of oddball gadgets and exciting new tech. But as kids we didn’t have money to buy a lot of what we saw. But he had a £5 note burning a hole in his pocket from Christmas and found a Casio RD-10 “card radio” on sale and grabbed it. He’s long-ago lost that one, but he was able to find a new old stock one and shows us the little gadget in the video below.
The card-thin (1.9 mm) FM radio had many odd features, especially for the 1980s. For one thing, it took a coin cell, which was exotic in those days. The headphones had a special flat connector that reminded us of an automotive fuse. Even the idea of an earbud was odd at that time.
It was a good idea not to lose the earbud, as it had that strange connector. The earbud worked as the antenna and power switch, too. Oddly enough, you could get a slightly fatter AM radio version, and they even made one that was AM and FM. Unsurprisingly, Casio even made a version with a calculator built-in. It had a solar cell, but that only powers the calculator. You still needed the coin cell for the radio.
The sound? Meh. But what did you expect? There was a stereo version, too. However, that one had a rechargeable battery, which was not in good health after a few decades. He also shows a Sony card radio that is a bit different. We were hoping for a teardown, especially of the rechargeable since it was toast, anyway, but for now, we’ll have to imagine what’s inside.
We love nostalgic radios, although usually they are a little older. We miss the days when a kid might think it was cool to see an ad touting: “Oh boy! We’re radio engineers!”
I managed to find a thumbnail of the internals on Google but the site it linked to (radiomuseum) didn’t seem to have the full image https://imgur.com/a/mwZYXJ6
What happened to Techmoan, he looks awful!
From his video description.
He could do with a new belt and some lithium grease, and will be as good as new afterwards.
I mean this with the upmost respect (love TechMoan), but is it just me or is Matt not looking well?
Don’t see how to edit comments on here. Should have checked the YouTube comments first. Apparently he has been ill, but is starting to feel better.
I was also a little startled, but he has a couple of videos on his patreon explaining that he had some kind of enhanced flu and lost 10kg(!). So hopefully all fine.
It’s actually utmost, not upmost.
I’d love to see a teardown of one of these. It must have taken quite some effort to implement RF and IF filtering in such a skinny package. Even with the DSP chipsets available today, you’d have to work hard to get it that thin.
Did anyone else ever notice that using the earphone or headphones in the power circuit of these small radios or cassette players always ruined the bass output?
I assume it was deguassing the magnets in the drivers.
That’s assuming folks haden’t destroyed the cords or lost them before you’d notice the damage. Depending on the unit and your usage, it would take a couple week to a couple of months to kill the bass.
I have a vape pen sized, pocket FM radio, from Radio Shack, early 90’s.
Good reception and could almost get 2 days of run time, but it destroys headphones.
Finally tossed it in a junk box somewhere, after it nuked a fairly nice set of headphones (Radio Shack Pro-60) when I stupidly plugged them into it for only a couple of nights.
P.S. I’d love to find something truly like the original Koss type cushions that came on them, not the ebay knock-off memory foam stuff.
In that period, a lot of items had a solar-powered calculator integrated, even other electronic tools who came with a battery. I had a small foldable (clamshell type) radio/calculator, I guess about 8mm thick. And the inevitable file folders.
When the craze had almost died down in the early 2000’s, we got the euro and everything came with a currency converter calculator!
Like these?:
https://a.co/d/cncsaVp
The ones I would need are for over the ear sized phones, so more of a loop vs a pad.
I’d like to find something in foam or velour covering. The pleather ones make your ears sweaty too fast.
That said, I do appreciate you posting the link! Never know where I’ll run across what I’m looking for.
The cheaper ones might have used a circuit with a single output transistor operated in ‘Class A’, I.e. a steady DC current is varied up and down by the audio signal, and the earphone is connected in series . This arrangement goes back to the 1960s at least, when expensive germanium transistors were all that was available, and the number used had to be minimised. The principle goes back to the early single-valve receivers of the 1920s.
Remember all of the devices that were incorporated into the PCM/CIA architecture? You could get all kinds of things. When I was a Cable Guy, we had cable-box-on-a-card for use in the then-nascent large-flatscreens and external-supplier boxes. It wasn’t a full box, just the tuner data, but still. There were network cards with pull-out “thru” connectors for RJ45’s and modem cards with the same for RJ11…
I think some cable boxes are the only thing still using those cards for cable card. I had tons of the single space 10/100 Ethernet and 56k modem cards but none of the adapters that that terminated to rj-45 and rj-11
Here’s what one looked like…
https://www.recycledgoods.com/us-robotics-33-6k-megahertz-pcmcia-modem-ethernet-xjem3336/