There Is No Cat

A Visit to the Autophoto Museum + Gallery in New York City

Last Friday Laura and I went into the city. One reason was to visit a new museum, the Autophoto Photobooth Gallery + Museum on the lower east side. They have several working old school photobooths which you can use. We're always on the lookout for these old booths. New Jersey used to have a few, but they're all gone here.

The first booth we used was a Model 14 that sits in the front window. It's in great shape. Very late 1950s, early 1960s look to it, a style we used to see a lot of on the Jersey Shore.

There was a booth to do color photos next to it, but the color paper is in short supply and they weren't operating it the day we were there.

Next up was a Model 21, very stylish, more of a 1970s vibe, bright colors and the like.

Up next was a rare Polaroid photobooth. For some reason, these never quite caught on, so there weren't many made. I think I've only seen a couple in the wild over the years, and not for many years.

I think this booth could probably use some adjustment. The photo looks underexposed to me and has a distinct green cast.

There is a Model 9 next to the Polaroid booth, but it is non-functional. The Model 9 was the first model produced by Autophoto, and is fairly primitive by comparison with later models like the Model 11, which introduced the ability to process more than one strip at a time.

There is a display in the back that shows the inner workings of a photobooth using a partial Model 20 with the front wall replaced with plexiglass.

There are also other displays about the history of photobooths. I didn't get pictures of all of them. I gather the displays will rotate. One of the displays was an art book of photographs of photobooth technicians.

Next up was a Model 17 that was only sporadically working. We paid our money and the strip didn't come out. In this picture you can see one of the docents working on the innards while on the phone with "Bre", the owner of the museum and most of the machines. When Laura had told me about the museum, I figured there was only one person with the assets to pull it off, and when the docent told me she was on the phone with Bre who was helping her troubleshoot, I knew that I was right, this was the brainchild of Breanna Conley Saxon, who was interviewed about photobooths on the much missed All Through A Lens podcast a few years ago.

She was able to retrieve our photos from the booth, somewhat damaged. We got a free sitting in the one booth we hadn't used that day, a Model 11 that had been converted to digital. The 11D outputs two strips of three photos each, a total of six photos, oriented horizontally rather than vertically. The photo quality is surprisingly similar to analog photo booths.

As a museum, it's good that they have an example of a digital conversion, but it pains me to see these, as it is how so many of these booths have wound up. The booth on the boardwalk in Asbury Park that used to be in Palace Amusements and in the basement of a mall on Cookman Ave. now sits in the Silverball Pinball Museum on the boardwalk converted to digital. Boo!

The last photobooth we tried was a rare Model 12, which produces larger photos, but only in a strip of three. The photos it produced look a little overexposed and washed out to me, which honestly is kind of in keeping with how they used to look back in the day. You could get some that were underexposed or underdeveloped, overexposed, or perfectly exposed and developed, depending on maintenance and the state of the chemicals. And that's one of the things that makes getting these so much fun.

The museum is tiny, just a storefront on a side street, and it was packed on the day we were there, about a week after it opened. The have a souvenir shop in the middle of the space.

I have to be honest, this was not a cheap date. Most of the photo booths cost $8 for a strip; the color booth and the Model 12 cost $12. That's actually in line with costs at other booths in NYC, maybe at the high end, but the booths are well maintained and in great shape. The souvenirs are also pretty expensive. That didn't stop us from getting anything, but it's worth keeping in mind if you're on a budget. Entry to the museum is free; they make their money on the use of the booths and the souvenir sales.

We had a wonderful time and really enjoyed out visit.

Posted at 3:20 PM
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Getting Into The Weed, Photographic Chemistry Edition

I've spent the last couple of weeks reading up on photographic chemistry. It started when I got the new 5th edition of The Darkroom Cookbook by Steve Anchell. I have three previous versions and it's a classic. There's a lot of great information in there. This is the book that convinced me to go to an all alkaline development process for my black and white films. Turns out that when you use alkaline fixer, the bad stuff you need to wash out (specifically hypo, typically sodium or ammonium thiosulfate) just drops right out after about 40 seconds of washing, unlike acid fixer, which requires a good ten minutes of washing. I started using Photographers Formulary TF-4 when I tried using a Pyro-based developer several years ago. Pyro didn't stick; I didn't see any benefit from using it. But the fixer did. And when I read The Darkroom Cookbook's earlier editions, I understood why it's a good idea. The new edition has a new section on digital negatives. I think I'm going to try the approach laid out there. I've tried others with step wedges and never really got things dialed in. I'm considering trying Platinum/Palladium printing, and digital negatives would come in very handy for that.

Steve Anchell also helped out on another book, The Film Developing Cookbook, whose primary author is Bill Troop, who it turns out formulated my favorite fixer, TF-4. The Darkroom Cookbook points to The Film Developing Cookbook for elaboration on several items, so when I finished The Darkroom Cookbook, I pulled The Film Developing Cookbook (second edition) off the shelf. Again, another very worthwhile read.

One thing that I noticed reading it this time is that Troop calls out a man named Grant Haist quite often. Now, I happen to know who Haist is. He was a research chemist at Kodak and an author and also a fine arts photographer. I have two of his books, George Eastman's Cameras, which is a survey of all the cameras Kodak put out during Eastman's life, and Modern Photographic Processing Volumes 1 & 2. I happened to discover Haist, who died in 2015, when many of his cameras went up for auction on the auction site Everything But The House. I wound up buying four of his cameras: A 5x7 Press Graflex that gets mentioned in his George Eastman book (he even mentions the serial number in the book, which is the one on the camera I bought), a Graflex RB Super D 4x5, a 4x5 Super Graphic, and a 4x5 Super Speed Graphic. Those latter two were the end of the line for the Speed Graphic line, and oddly, didn't have the focal plane shutter that distinguished the Speed Graphic from the Crown Graphic. I find those two less useful than my older Pacemaker Speed Graphic. Anyway, I have this two volume set by Grant Haist that I bought from the same estate sale, and I hadn't read it because it looks daunting, but I figured it was time after reading these other two books, one of which quoted him extensively.

It was a lot less daunting than I expected. It is a bit chemistry heavy, but that's a good thing, and the first couple of chapters are basically a lesson in chemistry down to the atomic level, learning about electrons and how elements bond and stuff like that. It's a good basis for the rest of the books. Volume 1 has most broadly interesting stuff. It explains how film stores the latent image when you expose it, and how developers amplify the latent image and make it visible, down to the atomic level. I have a much better understanding of how developing black and white film works after reading this. Then there ar several chapters that describe various classes of developers. There are of course solvent and non-solvent developers, but even those can be broken down. He even covers my favorite, Rodinal, briefly. There are formulas for dozens of different developers, as well as explanations of how they work. The Anchell and Troop books have a lot of this in them, but Haist goes over and above. There's quite a bit of history in there as wwll, with formulas for archaic and no longer useful mixtures that maybe wouldn't work so well with modern films. The first volume closes with an explanation of how fixing works. Troop calls out Haist for recommending alkaline fixing but saying that Kodak had prevented him from writing much about it because they considered it a trade secret. Sure enough, the section about fixing is acid this and acid that and all acid all the time. I didn't find much about alkaline fixing there.

The second book gets further into the weeds, if you will, covering topics that you may never need to use but that are still interesting. There are chapters about intensification and reduction with formulas on how to save over or under developed negatives, and toning, which is specific to darkroom printing and which many modern film photographers who practice a hybrid approach will never need. Haist also wrote about book about monobaths, The Monobath Book, which I don't have. There's a chapter about monobaths in volume 2. Almost all developers work best in an alkaline environment, not acid. So by definition, if you're using a monobath, you'll be using an alkaline fixer. And there, in the last paragraph of the chapter about monobaths, is the information that alkaline baths wash out so much more quickly, reaching archival levels of hypo after only 40 seconds of washing.

Other chapters in volume 2 cover stabilization and incorporated chemistry, both of which relate to extremely quick turnaround development where time is of the essence, for example, in military work, and having a process to view film in seconds is important while perhaps longevity is less important or at the very least can be postponed. I would think that digital photography has completely and utterly obsoleted the information here. Most of the rest of the book is about stuff that will reasonably be used by fine arts photographers for years, but these chapters, which were current in 1979 when the first edition of these books was published, are unlikely to find any use at all. They still made for interesting reading.

There is a chapter on reversal processing of black and white film, a niche even when it was written. I do this, and found much to be interested in here. I was trying to experiment with the Sabattier effect recently, with mixed success. There is information here that helped me understand why. There's also a very interesting chapter on diffusion transfer, the basis of instant photography. There's a lot of history in this chapter, but there's also a ton of chemistry. As someone with a passion for Polaroid, I found this particularly interesting. I think it gave me some insight into why. for example, New55 prints looked the way they did (I miss that film). I have a case of Polaroid 809 with dried up chemistry in the basement (fuck you, CatLABS) and may use some of the information in this chapter to replace the development pods and see if I can actually use that film.

Then there are two chapters on color processing. The chemistry here is at another level. It's like jumping from a 100 level beginners class to a graduate seminar. I read it. I'll probably have to read it a couple more times to really understand it. But I got some basics out of it. Again, another section with a lot of history in it. I have a better understanding of how Kodachrome was processed and understand why it will never return. (I also have a reference to a magazine article from 1939 about how to process it at home that might be worth looking up.)

I enjoyed reading all three books. The first two are readily available, still in print. The Haist books are a little trickier to find. The copies I have are from Haist's personal press, released in 2000. Haist Press died when Haist did, so the books are no longer in print. There is a seller on eBay who has copies of them, though. They're a little pricy, but if you want to go deep into this stuff, you would have a hard time finding a better read.

Now that I've read all these books, I'll almost certainly just keep using Rodinal for 98% of my photography. But at least I'll know about other options and when I might want to use them.

Posted at 3:21 AM
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Long Drives and Photography

I have been driving down to Florida rather than flying in recent years. I hate I-95. It's a dismal highway. It sucks in Maryland. It sucks in Virginia. It really sucks in North Carolina. It sucks pretty badly in South Carolina. I do what I can to avoid it. I take U.S. 13 down the eastern shore of Maryland and Virginia, cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, then pick up U.S. 17 south of Hampton Roads and take that through the Carolinas (for the most part). It's nearly as fast as I-95 and a lot more pleasant, very little in the way of white-knuckling traffic. And there's the opportunity to take the business route from time to time and see some interesting shore towns.

Going to St. Augustine this way takes me two days, same as if I take I-95. Maybe adds an hour or so to my travel time. I keep telling myself that this trip, I'm going to slow down, take my time, maybe take three days, and make the drive part of a vacation, taking pictures all the way. And every time, when the rubber hits the road, I fail to do that. I make mental notes of photogenic spots, which I mostly forget in specifics even if I remember a general impression.

There are two things that occur to me as a result of this. The first is that I could really use a phone app to mark photogenic spots while driving. Say you're driving along a road and have this app up, showing your route, and you see a run down old house that would make a good picture. Obviously, you don't want to handle your phone while you're driving, so the interface for marking spots would have to be voice-driven. "Siri, Scouter mark old run down house", and the program would create a marker with that spot, that you could review later and plan for a future trip. It would need to have the ability to generate routes, like Apple Maps or Google Maps, too, so that you wouldn't have to switch between it and your directions. I don't know of an app that does this. Maybe I need to learn Swift and make it.

Second thing is about shooting photos of old run down buildings, colloquially, ruin porn. What is it about stuff from the past that has seen better days that makes interesting photographs? Does it really make interesting photographs, or is it a cliche best left alone? I shoot a lot of stuff like this, and there is quite a bit of it along the eastern seaboard once you get off I-95. I had a lot of time to think about this as I sped past countless photographic opportunities at 70 miles per hour. I don't think I came to a conclusion. This debate in my head has kind of been ongoing for a while, but my inability to stop to take photographs while on a long haul drive kind of brought it to the fore. I'll probably keep thinking about it while I keep making these photographs, wondering if they're worth making and whether stuff falling apart is really all that compelling.

One exception to this was a building I found in the middle of nowhere in North Carolina as I had gotten off even the speedy U.S. 17 for some reason. On my way back from Florida in May, I let the GPS take me for a bit of a back roads adventure (I don't remember why) for a few miles, and I stumbled across an old building that I needed to take a photo of. I didn't stop. But when I got home, I retraced my tracks and found the building on Apple Maps, and noted the location. Heading down to Florida in late June, I routed myself past the building and stopped for ten minutes to take some photos. If I did this for everything I saw that I thought might make an interesting photo, I could easily extend my trip to three days instead of two. The question is whether it's worth spending the money on an extra night in a hotel and on another day of meals on the road and if the photos are worth taking.

The argument for shooting these building is that they have character. What does that mean? What am I trying to say when I make these photographs? I think it's probably something about the impermanence of the works of people, how things fall apart, entropy increases, we all die. But maybe it's just ruin porn, gawking at the backwardness of places that have fallen behind.

I'll probably be travelling to Florida a few more times between now and the end of the year. Maybe one of these trips I can give myself permission to take time and make some mistakes taking photos nobody needs to see.

Posted at 11:22 AM
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About Raindrops

If it seems I've been obsessed with raindrops the past couple of years, there's a reason, and I've never discussed why online. Until now, it wasn't really my story to tell.

My mom moved in with us three years ago. She had mobility issues, and her second-floor walk-up condo in Florida didn't fit her needs any more, so we moved her in with us back in New Jersey, in the house that she and my dad bought in 1978, which my wife and I bought from them in 2003.

She was housebound from the start, but could maneuver inside the house. I was her caregiver, but it wasn't that onerous, basically making her dinner and fetching things occasionally.

But over time, her latitude shrank. First to go was sitting at the kitchen table for dinner. She could still go to the kitchen and make herself lunch with whatever food was available on the refrigerator door (not so much in the rest of the fridge), but consumed all her meals in the lift chair she used in the family room. And with the passage of time, her walking with her walker slowed down and got more precarious. With every decrease in her capabilities, there was an increase in my need to provide her with help and to stay close to home.

In late October, she went into the hospital to deal with an infection that was discovered by some bloodwork the visiting nurse who treated her asked for. She came out in early November with a cancer diagnosis. Things started to decline faster from that point, and in January she entered hospice care.

She passed away on February 26, 2025, with her two living children by her side.

It has been difficult for me to get out of the house and go down the shore the way I used to as my mom's condition declined. The series of shots of raindrops started as a way to keep shooting something while not leaving my property, stealing 15 minutes or so to run off an entire roll of film after a rainstorm. And the worse her condition got, the more important it was for me to stay home or close to home, and my ability to travel shrank to pretty much nothing. But I could still steal 15 minutes and shoot some raindrops occasionally.

This project has been so closely tied to my caregiving responsibilities and my mom's condition, and now that she's gone, much of my constraints have disappeared (I still have caregiving responsibilities for another family member, but they're less imposing right now). I love the work, and expect to return to it, but not right now. It's still a bit raw, a bit too connected to a difficult time in my life. Thanks to everyone, especially my friends on the social network Glass, for your encouragement with these photos. It's been a way to maintain a bit of my sanity as the rest of my world kind of closed down.

Posted at 12:21 PM
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Offseason Issue 2

I made a new zine. Offseason, Issue 2, is devoted to postcards. When you would go to a motel on the Jersey Shore, there would be postcards in the desk showing the motel, which you were welcome to send to friends and family. This zine pretends to be a collection of such postcards. They are a mix of motels (mostly), businesses (a few), and attractions (a couple), and mostly from New Jersey. The zine is presented as a booklet from which you can remove the postcards and send them, much like little booklets of postcards you can get in gift shops on the shore. It’s bound using that sticky stuff that’s used to make pads of paper. There are 20 postcards included. I printed the cards myself on an Epson 3880 printer on linen postcard paper. I did my best to replicate the look of 1950s motel postcards with a modern process. I’m charging $12 to ship to the US, $16 elsewhere. It’s available from my Etsy site.

Posted at 2:38 PM
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Polaroid Week Autumn 2024 — Freedom

As we approach the election of 2024, something that is on everyone’s minds is freedom. As in, what does it mean, and will we still enjoy it after the results of the election are announced. Yale professor Timothy Snyder has written a book on the subject called “On Freedom”. I’ve read it twice this season. It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read. For this Polaroid Week, I’ve created pictures based on interpretations of points made in his book.

Snyder posits that there is a difference in conceptions of freedom, one of which is negative freedom, which can be thought of as “freedom from”, and positive freedom, or “freedom to”. Postive freedom is about enabling free people to live their lives to the fullest, and negative freedom is about preventing anything from preventing you from doing whatever you want. Positive freedom leads to democracy. Negative freedom leads in the opposite direction.

There are five components to positive freedom in Snyder’s estimation. The first of these is Sovereignty. Each person is sovereign over their own selves. They are responsible for their own being, their own decisions, their own beliefs. The task of a parent raising a child is to teach them to be a sovereign being, capable of judging right from wrong and living their life in a way that is true to themselves.

My first entry for Polaroid Week represents Sovereignty with a mixed media piece, one of my construction paper people on Polaroid Retinex Type-I film, with a piece of construction paper glued onto the frame so it extends outside the circular frame of the Retinex film.

The second component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Unpredictability. Corporations and politicians wish to make you predictable. Surveillance capitalism takes advantage of the capabilities of the Internet to track everything you do, use that to build a profile about you, and predict your desires for consumer products, which politicians you support, your sexual orientation, basically everything about you so that they can take advantage of that predictability to sell you something, either products or politics. A free person is unpredictable, and cannot be reduced to a list of attributes. Unpredictability is therefore the second component of positive freedom.

My second entry for Polaroid Week represents Unpredictability with the combination of two photographs. The photographs have been sliced halfway through, and slid together to form a single work.

The third component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Mobility. Originally in America, this was perhaps about moving to the frontier, as the country expanded, and having the ability to build one’s own life in new places. After the frontier closed, mobility in America became more about social mobility, the ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder and join the middle class. Increasing wealth inequality leads to less ability to do so; the ability to be mobile is a critical part of positive freedom.

My third entry for Polaroid Week represents Mobility with the addition of a motion blur filter from the Polaroid Spectra family of cameras, part of the Special Effects Filters package. I placed this over the lens of my Mint SLR-670X with I-Type support as I shot a portrait using Polaroid Retinex film.

The fourth component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Factuality. To quote Snyder, “Freedom is not us against the world but us within the world, knowing it and changing it.” In order to exist within the world as free people, we must understand the world. The ability to accept facts and truth are crucial to freedom. Lies are the foundation of negative freedom. To be truly free, we must be fact-oriented. Those who lead us by lies lead us into unfreedom.

My fourth entry for Polaroid Week represents Factuality by using the page of a dictionary as the basis of the “face” of one of my Retinex portraits. The dictionary defines the meanings of words. Practitioners of negative freedom will often redefine words or use them to mean things that they do not actually mean.

The fifth component of positive freedom in Timothy Snyder’s new book “On Freedom” is Solidarity. We cannot claim freedom for ourselves and deny it to others. Freedom only makes sense when we recognize in others the things we see in ourselves. America’s motto is E Pluribus Unum; Out of Many, One. What is that but an expression of solidarity? Those who dehumanize others are not interested in your freedom. Unions place solidarity at the top of their principles. We cannot be free unless we are all free.

My fifth entry for Polaroid Week represents Solidarity by photographing all my previous entries, plus a couple others, using the same Retinex film to give the impression of a single body made up all other bodies. I used the hexaprism filter from my Spectra Special Effects filter pack with my Mint SLR-670X Ming Edition I-Type camera.

This ends my Polaroid Week series for Autumn, 2024. I hope this has piqued your interest in Snyder’s book and made you think about freedom in perhaps a different way than you have before. Snyder’s book is available at https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom. If you’re American, election day is in a few days. Vote. Vote for freedom. Vote for freedom for all of us.

Posted at 12:48 AM
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The First Hit is Free

Twitter methadone networks are driving me crazy.

Razorfish laid me off a year and a half ago after working there for 13 years, but I landed a new job pretty much immediately with some of my fellow victims (seriously, I was asked to join before I even rolled off the old job). We had a great team, spent a year spinning up a new digital agency, and then it ended. It was a stupid ending and if you really care, buy me a beer and I’ll explain it offline. Anyway, I’ve been mostly unemployed since February. I had seven weeks of work back with the remnants of my old team at Razorfish back in May and June helping them meet a deadline, but other than that, I’ve been looking for work. The general unemployment rate is like 3.4%, but the unemployment rate for web developers is Fuck you, you really think this job we posted to LinkedIn is real? HA HA HA HA HA You’re an idiot! And the demand for 61 year old web developers with 31 years of experience, more than anyone this side of Tim Berners-Lee, is like negative. With Google and Facebook and Amazon laying off all the web developers they stockpiled when the pandemic started, anyone who needs a developer has their pick, and most won’t pick someone with my level of experience when they can get someone cheaper. I had planned on retiring at 62 anyway. I turn 62 in ten months. So I’m still looking because I’m still collecting unemployment insurance and the state kind of insists that you actually look for work if they’re going to pay you to not work, but if I don’t find anything between now and next month when it runs out I’ll just say fuck it and retire. Seems to me like the best way to find a job right now is through friends anyway. I mean it’s always been that way, but with all the AI/ML pre-scanning bullshit that resumes are being put through to eliminate all but a few applications and the several thousand applications for every single job out there, it’s like the only way to find a job right now.

So anyway, my life doesn’t have much structure right now.

I’ve come up with a list of things I want to do, and so far I’ve done exactly zero of them. One big reason is that I spend all fucking day in front of the computer obsessively checking on my Twitter methadone networks, Mastodon and Bluesky. It’s not healthy. With no structure in my life, I find myself terminally online, refreshing every few minutes to get the latest three posts to show up. It’s no way to live.

So at the beginning of September, I decided to do another dopamine detox. I did this back in March, and I wrote a brief something about it at the beginning of April. The stuff I wrote then still applies. Feel more present in my real life, not having my attention sucked up so much, blah blah blah.

So I’ve been relaxing this past month. I make breakfast for my father-in-law when he gets up in the middle of the afternoon. I talk with my mom about whatever crazy ass YouTube or TiVOed political thing she’s watching (usually Colbert or The Daily Show). I’m reading books. I’m kind of taking a course about web components that I backed on Kickstarter, because hey, maybe I’ll find a job where it’ll be useful and I need to keep up with the latest developments in web development technology. I’ve been going out some mornings before the live-in parents wake up to shoot pictures. I play Two Dots and Words With Friends. I still spend more time in front of the computer than I should reading the Washington Post and Talking Points Memo and obsessing about whether the U.S. has a future as a democracy or not.

I’ve been checking the networks again the past few days, although without posting. It still fucks with my head.

One way I was imposing some structure on my life was posting photos on my Twitter methadone networks three times a day at roughly the same time each day. I don’t think I’m going to do that any more. I’ll still post photos, but not on a schedule. That was fucking me up. Participating in things like the Shitty Camera Challenge was also kind of screwing with my head. All the pressure I felt was self-imposed, but I need to stop doing it. I need to get past my self-imposed sense of obligation in regards to these networks, and if I can’t, I need to remove myself from them.

As I mentioned in April, I’ve been online on social media networks of one sort or another for basically my entire adult life, a good 40 years now. It worked for me. And now, maybe it doesn’t. I’m trying to figure that out.

Posted at 1:50 AM
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The QODOSEN DX-286 on FM: A Contrarian Opinion

Over on Mastodon, one of the social media networks I’m on (basically Twitter without the assholes), Matt Blaze mentioned that he was very impressed with the FM reception of this cheap Chinese portable receiver, the QODOSEN DX-286. I’ve dabbled in distant FM reception for many years, and especially the past few years gotten into serious DXing there with my Elad FDM-S3, an SDR which can record the entire FM band. The DX-286 is available on Amazon for $80. Even an umemployed semi-retired layabout like me can afford that, so I bought one.

I don’t hear it.

The DX-286 has some nice features for FM, like several bandwidths that will allow you to separate closely-spaced stations. I live in the shadows of New York City, so the FM band is pretty full here, but the radio with its whip antenna does not fill the band in the way my Elad with its external antenna does. Fair enough, the Elad is a $2000 radio. But it doesn’t even compete with a 30 year old GE SuperRadio II that cost me $50 30 years ago (so a lot more comparable in price given inflation). I modified the SuperRadio to have a narrower bandwidth, 150 kHz, so that I could separate WXPN 88.5 Philadelphia from more local WBGO 88.3 Newark. It does that admirably. Similarly, I can get stable reception of WHYY 90.9 Philadelphia despite the presence of WFMU 91.1 East Orange (granted, not a blowtorch like WBGO), and WMMR 93.3 Philadelphia with next door 93.1 WPAT Paterson (a strong signal here), all with the attached whip antenna. None of the Philadelphia stations are audible at all with the QODOSEN DX-286 with its whip antenna. Hell, my 40 year old Sony ICF-2001 is a hotter FM receiver than the DX-286. I bought that radio when I was living in State College, PA, in the center of Pennsylvania, and I was able to basically cover the state with it using its whip antenna, hearing stations from Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, Erie, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and even Washington, DC, on a regular basis.

I have to conclude that the reputation of the DX-286 as a hot performer on FM is overblown.

Posted at 2:04 PM
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