The Cubic 3250 VLF-HF receiver is a 10kHz – 30 MHz DSP based radio receiver with 51 IF bandwidths and 7 receive modes. It falls into the category of professional/military grade equipment and the build quality certainly reflects this. According to Fred Osterman’s book, “Shortwave Receivers Past and Present, 3rd Ed.”, it was manufactured from the mid 1990s until at least 1998 (possibly later). I have found that the audio recovery and readability of this receiver is outstanding.

These receivers have a VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) as part of the front panel/human interface. The VFD in one of my units must have had many, many hours on it because it was quite fuzzy and dim, to the point of being blurry:

Aged, dim, blurry VFD

The old display on the CDR 3250 showed considerable burn in when viewed using … Read More »