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Grundig Yacht Boy 400 (old)

Yacht Boy 400; manufactured by Grundig, Fürth.

When I saw this Grundig Yacht Boy 400 the first time, I felt quite irritated, as the new Yacht Boy 400, a completely different set came to my mind.

This Yacht Boy is a compact single conversion travel radio with bandspread dial of the most common 6 shortwave bands. With the same designation Yacht Boy 400, Grundig brought out travel radio with PLL synthesized tuning and digital frequency readout, more then ten years later.

Technical Data

Power Supply

Dimensions

  • 220 x 135 x 40 mm, 0.7 kg

Accessories


Grundig Yacht Boy 400 (old)

Operation

The Grundig Yacht Boy 400 is a portable multiband „pocket radio“, with it's dimensions of 22,3 x 13,4 x 4 cm and a weight of 700 g, it will fit in your coat pocket or find some space in your suitcase without problems.

The Yacht Boy 400 is an early example of the small Grundig travel portables with a bandspread dial for several shortwave bands; it is quite similar to the the Yacht Boy 120, the upgraded Yacht Boy 100 with an integrated quartz clock from 1982.

The set was available in black and in silver colour.

The set covers the FM broadcast band, long and mediumwaves and six broadcast shortwave bands from 49 - 16 meters.

In the middle of the front panel, you find the slide control for volume, a rotary tone control and a sliding switch to select one of the six shortwave broadcast bands. The analog dials for the wavebands are located at the right half of the frontpanel, the tuning knob on the right side of the cabinet. Four pushbuttons are used to switch on the set and to select the waveband, a fifth smaller orange pushbutton switches off the radio.

A tiny window for the quartz clock is located above the round speaker grill. You can set the clock to display the time, the minutes and seconds only and the alarm time; the set can be switched to wake you up by radio music or a buzzer sound.

I red glowing LED next to the tuning dial will act as signal strength indicator for strong stations.

The set is powered by five AA batteries for the radio and an additional clock battery, there is a connector for a matching Grundig external power supply. The antenne is a 70 cm flexible / rotating telescopic antenna, the set has no external antenna connector.

The set has an adequate sensitivity on shortwaves, but it's analog dial with coarse frequency markings is a serious drawback. The set covers only six shortwave broadcast bands, the 22 meter band is omitted and out of band channels cannot be tuned.

With it's clock timer, the Grundig Yacht Boy will make a fine travel radio as long as you rely on FM and mediumwaves and just want to catch up some news from the major international broadcasters. If you really have to rely on informations from home on shortwaves, you should invest an additional amount of money in a set with digital frequency display - from this aspect, the Grundig Yacht Boy 400 can be considered as collector's item that sometimes can be found for a few Euros at an online auction.

Don't confound this set with the later variant of the Yacht Boy 400, a completely different radio with PLL synthesis and a digital frequency display, which did appear in 1994 and was very popular.

Technical Principle

Single conversion superhet.

Semiconductor Setup

The set is completely solid state.

Development

Keine Bilder gefunden.

Manuals

Additional Information

en/yacht_boy_400.txt · Zuletzt geändert: 2021/04/16 21:51 von mb