"** So they are cheap and nasty piles of Chinese junk that sell for like $40 ? "

No, they go for quite a bit more than that, but I bet you are probably close to the actual cost of them. And damnear everything is Chinese junk. Any company publicly traded in the US is pretty much governed by Dodge v Ford.

"No way are they TRF cos that is impossible. "

Why ? I tellya I seen the cores lower in the adjustable coil/transformers lower in the channels with the lower frequency. Are you saying that is all front end and they still downconvert ?

Maybe they do, leaving little for the IF to do in the way of selectivity and letting the previous stages do it. When you have like an audio type FM tuner, they use superhetrodyne because the customer want to tune from channel to channel at will and the IF provides most of the selectivity. But these are fixed. I believe I have mentioned that the frequency readout on the front panel are burnt in.

Yup, cheap Chinese **** made by Apex. But what ain't ? Everything is junk these days.

"** A 34.825MHz crystal can produce both 208.95 & 174.125 if multiplied by 6 and 5. "

This chipset has no such function as far as I can tell. These are very simple units, and cheaply build. There is no chip on the board up front.

What I am going to do next is look at more of these and while I know I will find the cores buried deeper in the coils associated with the lower frequency, I am going to pay special attention to the last one, which would be a coil for the quadrature detector.

If those are buried deeper that indicates TRF. For fixed frequency TRF is not a bad approach. Saves money and there is absolutely no radiation to worry about. So the FCC or whatever you have as its equivalent will not give you any trouble.

Anyway, from the gist of this whole thread I get that the crystal frequency is not necessarily what is printed on it. What if resistors and capacitors were like that ?

I might just have to take a freq counter in there but that is above my pay scale. That may change.

The scope they gave me is like 20 MHz, so I could see 10.7 MHz IF on it. And the chipset datasheets do indicate they are for FM, mobile FM in fact.

It probably doesn't matter, I think the people who own that company are hobbyists, rich kids who want to feel useful. Of course folks like that can be useful to me.