[Arran]

Joe;
  Most of what I am speaking of are Canadian market RCA models, usually built in Canada. I've noticed that there seems to have been a greater interest in shortwave reception in the Canadian market, for a longer period of time, then there was in the U.S. Even in the early 1940s most U.S manufacturers seemed to have been pairing down the number of models with short wave, and how much band coverage they had, whilst on the Canadian sets all but the cheapest models had at least one shortwave band, the RCA A-23/CGE KL500 were both five tube sets but had four bands.
   This may explain why Philco Products of Canada Ltd. produced slightly modified versions of the Philco Tropic line for sale on the Canadian market, particularly the ones with four or more bands. But for some reason whilst very few post war U.S models offered multiple short wave bands, and most of those died out around 1948, they were offering multi band house sets in Canada up until the mid 1950s, later if you could the import models like rebadged Graetz (RCA) or Phillips sets. Then you have the peculiar situation with the Canadian equivalent of a 49-905/50-925, the U.S sets have an FM band, the Canadian sets don't have FM but have a shortwave band and say "Tropic" on the dial, it isn't that there were no FM stations in Canada but for some reason this is what they did.
Regards
Arran