Anybody remember their 1st transistor radio?

It was a Christmas present in the middle '60s. I spliced a recycled earphone which had been sidelined by a broken wire at the jack onto the wires of it's replacement and had AM mono in both ears for twice the fun listening to late night Rolling Stones and Righteous Brothers from Boston's WBZ station.
 
Mine was a ten transistor black Midland. IIRC I was six years old, so that made it 1965. I've looked for a pic for years.

Tom
 
I got my first Sanyo transistor radio in the 70s, to check how far my illegal FM 25W transmitter was reaching . I walked for about 10 miles and i got interference from another (illegal) station. We played music all and every night. The radio had 5 signal strength LEDs.
 
Got in trouble when I took it to school to listen to the World Series.

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I don't remember mine, as I had dozens of them over the years. I remember the first I ever used (read, obsessed over, particularly the electronic gubbins inside), which is my father's Hitachi Transistor 6. It looked exactly like this:

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As far as I know, he still has it and probably still uses it. I'll try to remember to ask him.
 
Yeah, they were kind of marketed like cheap watches, only instead of proposed quality being based on the number of jewels, it was based on the number of transistors. I suspect some had non functional transistors glued in the case.
 
I had this GE model (circa 1965) Ge radio.jpg for about 30 years....still a number of them for sale on Ebay for $25-$50 amazingly.....
 
Yes, a little kit thing with a germanum detects diode, a Sylvania or TI germanium transistor, and a German made film sandwich tuning capacitor.
Next one was a nice sounding US made Westinghouse 7 germanium transistor portable set I used for years. My bro and dad got tiny Japanese made Marvel camel cigarette pack size pocket sets, equipped with 6 Toshiba geranium transistors. I still have the guts for one of them, the thin plastic casings were rather fragile outside their kid glove leather outer shroud. They were a remarkable feat of miniaturization for a fully engineered real superheterodyne pocket radio in the 1950s.
 
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Sure do...and here it is. Dad was an engineer who worked for GM and on one of his many business trips brought this back from Texas as a gift for me...that was in 1959.

It never left my hands for several months, even when I was sleeping. My friends at school were all jealous and as I remember it was an expensive gift for the time.
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My first "real" transistor portable radio was also one of these same color Westinghouse 7 transistor sets.
 
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My first was an RCA received as a bag of broken pieces. Somebody had dropped it on a hard floor. As a kid, this must have been one of my very first repair jobs. I managed to put the PCB back together somehow and mounted it in a cigar box along with the speaker. It worked just fine for years after.
 
This one. I got in on the occasion of my tenth Birthday. Retail price 268 Deutsche Mark in 1972. Maybe some 65 or 70 dollars back then.

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Silvertone or Truetone...would have been about 1965 or 6. May have come from Western Auto. Black and silver. I remember laying under the covers in bed listening to WHB from KC. It was like magic!
 
Had one of these in the early and mid 60's:

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I remember 3 things I did with it growing up in northern Indiana:

Put it under my pillow to listen to WLS - specifically remember hearing Lou Christie's "Lightning Strikes" at that time.

Had this on when my family was in the basement waiting out the 1965 Palm Sunday tornadoes. There was so much static you could barely hear the announcer, but fortunately the tornadoes did not hit my immediate area. I can assure you watching the sky turn black (And I mean BLACK, not just grey) in the middle of the day is rather disconcerting, though.

Took it to school to listen to the 1968 World Series - Go Tigers, my father was from Detroit.
 
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