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"Sports Band" above 1100 kHz on AM?

K

kevtronics

This vintage radio caught my eye on eBay. It's from 1970s, and has the AM band split up into two dials: normal AM radio going from 540 to 1100 kHz, and "Sports" going from 1100 to 1600 kHz. Is that just because stations providing coverage of local sports were more likely to be on the upper end of the AM band, including the "graveyard channel" frequencies? In my area that was the case, with a daytimer on 1170, a graveyard channel on 1450, and another small station on 1590 providing coverage of local high school games.

The pictograms also seem to indicate that AM is for talk and sports while FM is for music, even though that didn't start to become common practice until a decade after this radio was made.

And then of course there's the fake "TV screen" which is just some flashing "disco lights".

www.ebay.com

Vintage 1970s Solid State Amico AM FM SPORTS Portable Radio With Disco Lights | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Vintage 1970s Solid State Amico AM FM SPORTS Portable Radio With Disco Lights at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!
www.ebay.com

sports.jpg
 
MarioMania said:
I never saw a radio like that
Click to expand...
Nor have I. I guess the "instant sound" referred to the absence of a warm-up time associated with tube-powered radios.
 
Good find Kevtronics, thought this info might interest you and others, Amico was Philadelphia based and made "odd" radios in the Far East.
Picking above 1100 khz for sports stations, I don't know about that? Sport stations in my area were on the low, middle and high end of the AM band.

from Radiomuseum website, clicking on the links will show you some pictures of their products, if a picture was available.

Amico ; Philadelphia, PA manufacturer in USA, Model types fr | Radiomuseum.org

Al
 
I wonder if it was a radio for kids. Threw in sports to attract boys, maybe? And a basic log for the little DXer in the family?
 
I think the numbering may be a red herring. It seems clear from the picture that the scale is the same on both the AM and "sports" settings; it's not as if 1100 is at the top of the dial on one and at the bottom on the other. My wild guess is that they split the frequency numbering arbitrarily between the two rows as a visual design choice and that the two "bands" are one and the same. I'm guessing that the "sports" setting is really just AM with a narrower bandwidth or other different parameters to optimize listening to play-by-play on skywave while "AM" is intended for everyday listening to local stations.
 
It's probably just a positioning thing. I've heard of such radios before and, well, they're nothing to get excited about.
 
Marketing tool, basically. That's what it looks like to me. After all, it's just the AM band, "bands" 1 & 2 are the same band.

A lot of multibanders from the 1970s were like that. They'd do that with the VHF High band a lot, calling one half of it "Police" and another half of it "Weather" or something like that. That way a multibander would be advertised with more "bands" than it actually had.
 
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