Early Transistor Radios from Japan

Most of the radios that had a Shortwave band were not pocket size. Some of them were very small but wouldn't fit into a shirt pocket, however some could fit into a pants pocket. Levi Jeans were not accommodating but some work clothes and dress slacks had enough room. A lot of them came with a shoulder strap also.

Toshiba and Sony, IMHO, made the best of the imported transistor radios.
 I was totally lucky a few years back to get a pair of NOS Toshibas at a garage sale still in the original boxes,  brand new, with all accessories. That was a hen's tooth lucky find. I have never even put a battery  in them to try them out.

 I have not seen many pocket radios with SW bands on them, other than some by Grundig- The Yacht Boy series.
    I found one at a garage sale and bought it, but it has horrible CPU generated noise in it that I have not been able to fix. I contacted Grundig in Europe  who said they had no schematic and to contact Grundig USA who said they didn't have a schematic and to contact Grundig in Europe. That was a disappointing experience.

That's a great story, and something I have not run across. 
I'll never forget my first transistor radio. My dad took my brother and I to an appliance store here in Buffalo that also sold radios. It was a shirt pocket sized gray thing, that earphone was always stuck in my ear......Over the years I've picked up some neat ones. I always leaned toward the ones that received MW and SW. That was probably too expensive of a radio when I was a kid, but ,of course, now they're quite affordable. I kind of like the Toshiba designs the best.

Yes Cliff. Too true.

 They would also change the colors of the cases, trim, knobs, etc. Cosmetic changes.

Another thing they would do is take radios and apply several names just to get through the restrictions of how many radios any one company could import to the U.S. Thats why you can see so many that have the same internals and cases.

Here is a true story for you. Flop in your easy chair, grab a drink, some popcorn, & a sandwich.      
   
Back in the early days of transistor radios, the U.S. market was flooded with Asian made cheap transistor radios. Most of these were "Shirt Pocket" size. You know the ones.

 Well the event I call  "The Transistor War" started. It was mostly one upsmanship. In other words, "Mine is bigger than yours", or in this case reality was " My radio has more transistors than yours does".

Now this was not necessarily a bad thing, because as you know, the more tubes a radio had, the higher quality it was (usually). So the lowly 4 or 5 transistor pocket radio had lots of competition for sales and many touted "Ours has more transistors". OK typically this was true until......
 Some of the less ethical makers decided that they would screw the U.S. sales market. There was much deception, and misdirection. It was not down right lying, but very, very deceptive business practices, IMO. 
  (The major makers of the radios like Sony, National, etc. did not stoop to this kind of trickery that I ever saw or heard about. They were quite ethical as they were trying to make a legitimate high quality product and build a reputation for their name brand quality).

 Now I had read about this practice in the trade journals of the time, and was a tad skeptical. But then I had to work on a few of the radios.

The manufacturers DID have the number of transistors in the radio they claimed they did, however:
 Some had a transistor soldered to PC pads and connected to nothing else.   Sometimes I found that as many as 2 of the transistors did absolutely nothing and were not even connected. It was in the radio and just took up space.  They served no useful purpose other than "Adding to the transistor count". Other times, a transistor with a bad junction or way out of spec. was used as the detector diode. Yeah, it was one additional transistor saved from the garbage bin, and used where the detector diode normally was. Nothing wrong with that except it was a real "gray" area of unacceptable advertising, IMHO. 

  The one I remember the most was 2 transistors in series, with one junction in each being used as the detector diode. That one blew me away. I do wish I could remember the model & make. (I do believe it was a really cheap off brand). The radio actually showed this wacko detector setup in the schematic . This added 2 more transistors to the count and in reality was tricking the customer into thinking the radio was much higher quality than it was.

I often saw this sort of practice in super cheap 5 transistor sets that advertised they were "6 transistor sets" Well they were, sort of. It is just the 6th transistor did nothing at all most of the time.

Some sets actually did use an additional transistor as an extra RF amplifier stage, resulting in superior performance and sensitivity. Those sets were REALLY desirable. I seldom saw those sets however. The quality built sets seldom needed service except for cleaning the volume control pot or replacement of the 9 V. battery connector. They would get a broken lead or the battery would be left in too long and corrode the connector. 

So that is todays lesson in early transistor radio history. You will likely run into this bit of early history yourself at some point if you work on and collect transistor radios.