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Some sections of the
consumer electronics market have often shown a fairly relaxed attitude towards
technical specifications and feature descriptions. It started in earnest in the
early sixties and lasted until the late eighties, when legislation was
introduced. Throughout that period some pretty big whoppers appeared in
promotional and advertising material. The claims made for this late 70s vintage
Binatone Worldstar multi-band radio are quite ambitious and must have suckered
a good few punters -- including me -- into thinking that it was a lot more
sophisticated than it actually was. This model, also sold under a number of
other names, was widely touted as a sophisticated 9-band ‘World Radio’, capable
of pulling in transmissions from around the globe. At first glance it does have
the air of an advanced communications receiver, more so when shown with the
flip-up cover for the tuner scale in the open position, displaying a fancy
looking time zone calculator and a world map. 
Unfortunately, like so
much about the Worldstar, this was cosmetic fluff, like those alleged 9 wave
bands. On the tuning scale they are listed as AM Broadcast, Sport, B1 Marine,
B2 Marine, LW Long wave, FM Music, VHF Aircraft, VHF High and VHF Weather. It
all sounds rather exotic but in reality it has only 5 switchable wavebands,
namely: Long Wave, Medium Wave, VHF FM and High Band VHF. At least four of the
nine purported wavebands were unused in Europe but in any case, even in the US,
the market it was originally designed for, it would still have been next to
useless for the applications suggested by the waveband names. Incidentally the
two so-called Marine bands, covering 200 to 300kHz, were almost exclusively
used by the Loran directional beacons. It is highly unlikely that American
mariners trust a basic radio like this for navigational purposes, except in the
direst emergency. 
Three of the five
actual bands (AM, LW and FM) work well enough for receiving regular broadcast
radio stations, and the VHF Aircraft can sometimes pick up brief snatches of
Air Traffic Control and Pilot exchanges, though you would need to be fairly
close to an airport or flight path. However, if you were a UK buyer expecting
it to pick up anything to do with sport, maritime matters or the weather you
would have been sadly disappointed. Other questionable features include the
twin telescopic antennas; only one of them really does anything, the other is
largely for show, as is the red LED attached to the tuning needle. This glows
whenever a station is received, which is most of the time on a busy broadcast
band. The sliding Squelch control – a useful feature on communications
receivers for eliminating background hiss – is also a bit superfluous on this
radio since the opportunities for it to pick up the sort of intermittent
transmissions it is meant for would have been few and far between. 
My first encounter with
the Worldstar was probably soon after it went on sale, in the mid 1970s. I
recall that at the time it was widely advertised in the national press, weekly
publications like Exchange and Mart and specialist magazines. It definitely
caught my eye but after reading the small print I must have figured out that it
was all a bit of a sham. We met again some 40 years later when I spotted this
one lurking in a box of junk under a wallpaper-pasting table at a local car
boot sale. It appeared to be in reasonably good physical shape, though the top
flap with the map was missing but I didn’t have the heart to haggle over the