无线电问答汇刊

Collections of Radio Q&A 無線電問答彙刊 was issued in Shanghai in 1932 by the China Radio Company 亞美公司 (亞美股份有限公司), at 323 Kiangse Road 江西路三百廿三號, and edited by Su Zuguo 蘇祖國. It appeared twice a month, on the 5th and the 20th, at twenty cents an issue; the run reached at least twenty-four numbers, several of which were later reissued as combined volumes.

The format is entirely reader-driven. Each number prints questions sent in by readers — on components, tubes, coils, condensers, aerials and earths, batteries and power supplies, crystal sets, detection, interference, and what a given receiver could actually pull in — followed by the company’s answers. The compiled subject index to nos. 1–24 sorts them into two broad classes, parts 零件 and receivers and transmitters 收音機及播音機, which together amount to a rough syllabus of what a Chinese radio hobbyist was expected to know.

Two features make the run useful beyond the history of amateur technique:

• Every issue carries the joint programme schedule of the radio stations 各電台聯合播音節目, printed as a supplement. Read across the run, these are a serialised record of what Shanghai stations were putting on the air through 1932.
• The advertising is dense and specific, both for the publisher’s own AMA-branded parts, priced to the fen, and for imported receivers such as the Atwater Kent 愛開牌 sets handled by the Sincere Company 先施公司. Prices, model numbers, and the retail network — agents in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Songjiang, Changshu, Pinghu — are recorded issue by issue.

No. 19 departs from the pattern: it is a special broadcasting number 廣播特刊, priced at twenty-five cents.

The transcription is there to make the run searchable and readable; for quotation, please consult the original scans, available from the CRAC download page that also serves the rest of this collection.