Zenith Royal 3000-1 Antenna

The Zenith Transoceanic radio has a snap-up handle, which conceals a monopole telescopic antenna for receiving Short Wave (SW) and FM bands. To receive any radio stations in SW, the antenna will require deploying.

External Aerial and Earth

This radio has a facility at the back (screw terminals) for you to connect an external aerial and an earth wire, to increase the sensitivity and thereby the range of the signals it can receive.

With cheap radios, and sometimes even expensive ones, you might notice that an external aerial tends to clump all the stations including RF noise in one place, making it useless for receiving long-distance signals.

One of the wonderful things about this radio is that it has slug-tuned stages, which enables you to select only the signal you need, and therefore radios like these tend to outperform others when an external aerial is connected.

Inside the radio, there are three screw terminals, and the first one will already have a wire connected to it. This wire is from the telescopic aerial concealed within the snap-up handle. The second screw terminal is for the antenna, and the third one is for ground. Due to the highly tuned circuits, and germanium transistors, the radio is extremely sensitive to RF waves including radio magnetic spikes generated by lightning. Therefore, use an external antenna only for receiving distant signals.

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