The local blood bank comes to our community regularly and I donate. It's convenient and they give you a $20 gift card! So when they were here on Tuesday, I dropped by after taking Mitzi to the airport and gave a pint.

I poke around eBay, looking at old radios. Sometimes I want to see what they're selling for because there's one up on Goodwill. If there's something I'm interested in, I'll add it to my Watch List. I may not be interested in buying it, I may just be interested in seeing what it sells for.

I guess sellers find out when you've added something they're offering to your Watch List, and sometimes they'll offer you a discount. I've taken advantage on one or two of those, and I suppose that data is shared with sellers as well. Who knows? At any rate, I get a lot of discount offers.

I almost took one for a Sony ICF-7601. The particular listing I'm talking about shows it as an ICF-7601L, but the photos all indicate that it's not an "L" model, which deleted shortwave band 1, and added a longwave band. It's listed at $100, and the seller offered me 15% off. So I searched on recent completed listings and found that that radio often goes for much less than that, with all the accessories!

What piqued my interest was a web site about Sony design, so I'd been thinking about adding a Sony portable to my collection. The 7601 is a fully analog radio, with no digital display or processing of any kind. Mixed reviews. Good to great sensitivity, average selectivity, gets overloaded on an external antenna, not a hall-of-famer by any means, but a decent radio.

So I made a mental note to keep an eye out for one. Not the $85.00 one either.

Well, then I saw a Tecsun R9700DX, and damned if it didn't look just like an ICF-7601!

I don't really fully understand this radio manufacturing business. Who actually designs and builds what, who's an OEM, who just slaps a badge on whatever's on offer. The ICF-7601 was still being sold in some markets well into the 2000s, so someone was manufacturing it for Sony.

Well, to make a long story short, the R9700DX looks like the same design as the ICF-7601. So, it's not a Sony; but it's not 30+ years old either. It's an all analog radio that gets the same kind of marks the 7601 seemed to get. It's small, not tiny like a C.Crane Skywave, has an illuminated band/frequency display and it's $59 at Amazon.

That's not the lowest price it's been offered at Amazon either. It had recently been sold for ~$45, so $59 wasn't exactly a deal.

But...

I did have that $20 Amazon gift card. Blood money.

$43.85 delivered. Should be here tomorrow.