[Radio Wrangler]

For radio fixing and alignment, most people use classic RF signal generators. Most of these will cover long wave RF up to 30MHz quite well, and may give harmonics up to 100MHz. Most are AM or CW with no FM. They'll do you for AM broadcast sets and shortwave receivers. What's missing is the VHF/FM band and frequency modulation, and the ability to sweep so you can set up bandpass tuned IFs (as opposed to simple peak-tuned ones)

I have a Marconi TF2008. Nineteen sixties/seventies vintage. It covers 9kHz to 510MHz, which is a bit excessive for broadcast/shortwave radio. It does AM and FM - and it can sweep so that you can use an oscilloscope to display filter shapes as you adjust wider IFs for FM sets - It's also good for tuning the bandpass filters in 'Wadley' type receivers (RA17 family)

Where it gets fiddly is in low frequencies, it may work down low, but the scale is a bit fast.

And it goes down to very low amplitudes. Don't undervalue this. It's useful to see if the RF or IF section you are aligning is sensitive enough. You can debug low gain faults. With a cruder sig gen without a good attenuator and good screening, everything seems to work!

So if you're interested in AM sets, then there are lots of old cheap sig gens on the market for pocket money prices. If you want to be able to handle FM sets, then you have to work a bit harder to find something with FM and higher frequency coverage.

A number of people have bought function generators to augment classic RF sig gens. They use them as an addition, to make sweep signals for bandpass alignment.

I too am rather fond of HP test gear, but I used to work there, designing it, so I might be a little bit biased...

David