I decided on a whim the other week to give Freecycle.com a try.  You know the free website where you can post things you no longer need and others will come and pick them up locally to you.  I didn't really have a lot of faith in it because for some of the posts I had been reading it was mostly junk and broken items being offered.  And the wanted postings were quite blatantly obvious that they were looking for items to resell on places like eBay and craigslist - ie. Wanted textbooks in good shape and for recent classes for person considering going back to school.  Yeah right, what person is going to go and read all those darn textbooks on a wide range of possible subjects just to prepare themselves to go back to school? 

Anyway, so I logged into the local Charlotte North Carolina Freecycle homepage and scrolled down through the list of items being offered and found one that said SW radio.  I e-mailed the person and just asked them if it worked.  Their response was short and stated yes and when did I want to pick it up.  So I went to pick it up in this older gentleman had it all hooked up so I could see that the short wave radio stations worked and was it fully functional.  The thing works like it was brand-new and it must be from like 1962.  Just look at the pictures below.



When I got home I plugged it in and it worked beautifully.  The owner also had the original owners manual for the shortwave radio.  It was also in immaculate condition.  Just to see what year range the radio was from because it was obviously quite old, I did a little research on the Internet.  The radio was obviously a Realistic brand radio which was manufactured by RadioShack and the model was the astronaut 5.  I could not find anything on the Internet about the astronaut 5 model, but I did find the astronaut 8 which RadioShack stopped manufacturing in 1974 or so and is considered by most to be antique.  So this must mean that the astronaut 5 model is much older and I would only be guessing that it is in the early 60s that this model was produced.  If my dad were still alive (he loved her wave radios, ham radios, and all sorts of related gadgets) he would have been in his heyday with this radio.



This transaction cost me absolutely nothing to obtain this great radio (which is around 50 years old!) and definitely change my view of the items that are being offered on places like Freecycle.  If you haven't been on your local Freecycle as of yet, then you need to just take a look and check into it because it's an amazing site and it's not just junk being passed around.



I got a wonderful, antique radio and had a wonderful experience - the other day I even found a Japanese radio station through the shortwave channels - that was pretty neat and it came in very clear.  I would definitely recommend the Charlotte NC Freecycle wesite.  You never know which you might find and what might be one person's junk or left overs could easily be another person's treasure.