Antique radios, Old Time Radios
About Radiomuseum
Indeed, there are a great many collector´s
home pages and forums, but
many of these have a big disadvantage: searching
for and
exchanging detailed information becomes more and
more complicated and frustrating and cannot be
performed easily and in reasonable time.
What is the aim of this site?
A reference work as a book - even in looseleaf
sheets - can never be up to date.
We learn about new facts nearly every day which
cannot be added to a book. Someone who begins
collecting radios will search the Internet for
information these days - and will find hundreds of places
... Each bringing only a tiny fraction of information about
this big field of antique radios etc.
This site should become a common virtual museum
and a «most complete catalog for
radios». We have
already archived this target for the German
speaking countries - for others we are close.
Further expansion depends on other collectors
who are willing to upload additional models.
This catalog enables collectors to look for
specific collector's prices, detailed
information and advertisements regarding a
specific model. Of interest for collectors is
the ability to present their own collection or tube collection. About 2000
active members have already done this by uploading pictures
(of their models).
The forum (and "Papers") also have been well
received and we see that guests and members
access these articles between 6000 and 12.000 times
a day. In "Papers" we expect exceptionally good
articles either from club periodicals or other
sources as well as yet unpublished ones.
Easily found by Google
You´ll find that articles or collections of our
members have top ranking on Google. That is
the main advantage to a private web page. Examples:
Type Edith Mills in Google (yielding mostly 1st of >2
million) or try Konrad Birkner.
Membership
To prevent inappropriate pictures and activities from
spreading over the site, only registered members can upload
pictures and administrators have to accept before being
visible.
RMorg now shows more than 500.000 pictures (half of them
are schematics) for 155.000 radio models, 60.000 of them for
the USA. Members can click on to view in large size.
Every interested collector is invited to join the activities
and to become a co-worker instead
of remaining a free-rider. The slightest
amount of help is most welcome - even if it is
only a comment on a model. To secure
responsibility (for forum and data etc.) we
identify collectors by their real name.
Who would not be grateful for a good piece of
advice from an experienced collector? Collecting
is a dead-end without mutual exchange of
information. Here
you can upload your comments or questions
directly on the model - here you can find
people who are willing to answer your
question. Have you ever been frustrated not finding a
certain, interesting article in an old
periodical? We want to preserve and publish such
articles. This can only be achieved when people
from all over the world cooperate. October 2009 we are now
6200 collectors from more than 75 nations. Support
for the
organization comes from the «Foundation Radiomuseum
Lucerne» which was founded and is being financed
by myself to make sure that the organization
continues after my passing away. Here is some more insurance for
continuity - and this is the second part. I am looking
for «Officers» who would like to be in charge of
certain administrative tasks – e.g. checking and
activating picture or text contributions by
members. This work would be in an voluntee
capacity.
There is much work to be done until the final
goal is achieved. Let's do it. Looking forward
to your participation.
Lucerne, Switzerland, 22nd January 2004, Ernst
Erb (HB9RXQ, EA8BGN)
Final touch for English: Sir R., GB, and Michele Denber,
USA.
[ dsp_ueber_radiomuseum.cfm ]
This is only for the ones who are
interested to konw how all this started:
How did the virtual museum come into being?
After the unexpected great success of the
book «Radios von gestern» (first edition 1989) I
had to reissue two further editions (see
comments on www. amazon.de) and
after «Radiokatalog volume 1» had been finished,
I decided to publish both books on the web
before finishing volume 2, in order to
facilitate this «on-line-reference book», a
meeting place for all interested collectors.
I wanted to help collectors avoid doing
duplicate work in different places, when they
didn't know of the existence of like minded
individuals. We can already
see this happening on the web – I consider this
pitiful nonsense. For example, considering the
innumerable times the 11 schematics books of Lange-
Nowisch have been scanned, consuming thousands
of hours of work and represented in different
qualities on CDs or partly on the web, the waste
of time and energy is clearly visible.
It is obvious that we can achieve much more when
working together in a well coordinated way. I
first tried to introduce my idea to a big club -
which showed no interest. Therefore I have been
working full time on the realization of this
project since 1998. I had to learn, accepting
that only one single person can tackle this big
task - someone who is a passionate and
interested collector and who is in possession of
the demanded time and financial resources.
Apart from the help of specialized software
companies it is absolutely necessary to have a
profound knowledge of the Internet which I first
had to obtain by hard work. It took three
attempts to find a software company which was
capable of realizing my demanding plans nearly
to my satisfaction. However, the
software produced was a mess. Being
unprofessional, non
structured «spaghetti code», incapable of
identifying search engines were only the worst
problems. Since I had experience in founding and
establishing a software house I thought the age
of amateurish software development was over.
But I was wrong, and in the end this company even
went bankrupt.
Since 2003 we have a new solution, realized
in my house with a software engineer (from ETH) at my
side. Our vision has largely come true, delivering
all the information a real radio lover would want
to know about
in a logical and systematic form, reaching
thousands of collectors every day.
