Playing with an inflation calculator: Today, the IC-7300 can be had (with promotion) for ~$1000, that's ~$90 in 1959 dollars.
Back then, an entry level Hallicrafters S-53A single conversion receiver sold for $89.95 according to my 1959 World Radio Labs catalog.

Quality radio equipment is cheaper now than it's ever been.

Inflation sucks for savers.  But you get more bang for your buck these days in the radio world.

$89 buys a much more feature rich radio today than it did then.

Tecsun Digital PL330 AM/FM/LW/SW Worldband Radio with Single Side Band Receiver https://a.co/d/3PxQzTg

I had one of those as a kid.

You were fortunate. I built a 2-stage regenerative receiver and upgraded to a WW2 surplus BC 455 ARC-5 receiver before Dad got me a Hallicrafters S-38B on advice from my uncle (who was in the Army Signal Corps and knew everything there was to know about radios).
I preferred the 'ginny and 455.

Touch labor (human actions) for assembly of modern radios is far, far less than it was in the old days. The same for testing, it is mostly automated with very little labor involved. Solid state components are far more reliable leading to much lower reverse flow (rejected at test) material. The same is true from modularity perspective; subassemblies (e.g. front panel) can be tested independently prior to assembling an entire radio.

This trend continues. Modern, direct-sampling SDR designs have a much lower parts count and substantially fewer adjustments to make and most adjustments can be done in an automated manner. This is why an FT-710 or IC-7300 can be sold for <$1K and outperform superhet's costing four times as much.

From the same '59 catalog, a top-of-the-line Collins 75S1 receiver was $495 and a 32S1 transmitter was $590, for a total of $1085.

Those $7 ARC-5 "Command" receivers were a godsend to us penny-pinching Novices. A junk radio from a repair shop to use as a power supply, a couple of hour's mods and we were GTG. And we had just as much, if not more, fun as today's hams.

I have an S-38DB. I think it sold for $49.95 in 1959

I bought it recapped in perfect working order 5 years ago for $50

so same price as new

Attached File

The S-38 series made a fairly good SWL receiver. It was essentially an AC/DC "All American 5" with 3 SW bands and regeneration added to the I.F. stage to serve as a BFO. The BFO pulled like crazy on strong signals. SSB copy was pretty much unintelligible, but nobody was running SSB back then, it was all AM. IIRC, ironically the S-38A had a separate tube for the BFO.

I wanted to monitor police and fire calls so a friend helped me cut the coils and retune everything on a BC-603 that supposedly came out of a tank and ran 20-27 MHz.

we retuned it to the 30-50 MHz band and it did the job.

Circa 1965 it cost me almost $20 from Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio.