academy: Compass : One chassis many badges?

Hong Kong & Asian sets generally are often sold by many companies. "Badge Engineering". In 2012 many well known brands of UK set-box for TV are actually made by Turkish Vestel. Many brands of TV in UK and Ireland were actually Turkish Beko.

 

Here a Binatone that is obiviously the same chassis as the Academy Compass

Binatone Worldstar MW/MB/LW/FM/VHF

Similar Models were sold as Oscar and "Silver Space".

There is of course a "styling" nod at the last expensive Zenith World Radio, the uncompetitve 7000 series. (Sony & Grundig had Digital displays and other features).

These are not of course great performance radio sets, but slightly better than the MW only Hong Kong transistor set and benefiting from the larger cabinet, ferrite rod and loudspeaker.

An Ebay seller claims the Binatone Worldstar is 1975. It has the exact same bands and controls.

 

A feature not mentioned in the "notes" is that the Tuning cursor has an LED with brightness controlled by signal level as tuning indicator.

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Hallo Michael,
I just had a look in the cellar, somewhere on the shelves I found another very similar radio, called

Colonel 697

It served my son as first entry level allwave radio and mainly for FM listening and I have not yet thrown it away but kept it as an exemple of a cheap poor quality labelled multiband radio.

As they cover the VHF band ("Police band"), they vere not allowed at all in Germany, but were allowed to be sold, to be owned but not to be operated (at least not on illegal frequencies) in Switzerland. Usually, they carried because of this fact as "Export sets" a quite high price tag and later, many people were disappointed when they tried to sell the expensive radio second hand (same with the PAN Crusader, Globephone and similar sets).

Kind regards Martin Boesch

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