Boatanchor History

The Japanese may be an exception, as they don't do a lot of military work, but ham radio is pretty much a side line for them too. Their meat 'n' potatoes are marine and commercial radios, and then ham radio as the Japanese see it, which is often closer to (pardon the expression) a licensed version of our CB. Sure, there are a million hams in Japan, but most have a readily available, severely restricted license that allows only a couple of bands and modes.

Even mighty RCA, which was way too big to ever have to depend on hams, and which for some years even owned the very concept of the superheterodyne itself, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Its historic building in New York, still the headquarters of NBC, now says "GE" on top. It's that kind of business.

Most U.S. communication radios were originally made in three regions, possibly because the first companies clustered around the few plants that were licensed by RCA. There was one group in the Northeast, one in the Midwest, and one in California, generations before anyone had heard of Silicon Valley.

Many of the Northeastern companies began in small factories on Manhattan's Radio Row, which has since been completely obliterated by the World Trade Center. The California firms tended to concentrate in what is now a grungy part of L.A.'s Westlake district, near Alvarado and Venice Boulevard (where Gilfillan, now ITT's radar division, made radios on license from RCA). The Midwestern manufacturers were more spread out, like Collins in Iowa, Motorola in Illinois, and Drake in Ohio. Nearly all of these companies began in basements or garages, before or during World War II.

After World War II, HF voice radio started out pretty much with prewar AM technology, but soon began the slow conversion to the far more efficient SSB. It's true that hams invented sideband, but not that they perfected it. The phone company was using it in the 1930s. The ARRL pushed hard for its adoption after the war, but the real impetus for conversion came when General Curtis "Iron Ass" LeMay got the U.S. Air Force to adopt sideband for all of its HF comm. After this, it was only a matter of time for hams, and just about everyone else on HF. AM didn't die out completely, and it remains a fine ragchewing mode and a viable hobby within a hobby, but for most hams the quack-quack sound became far more prevalent.

SSB required some circuit changes in receivers, but nothing fundamental. The BFO had to be refined, filter passbands had to be adjusted, AVC had to be tweaked, and ultimately product detectors replaced simple diodes. Stability, both mechanical and electrical, needed a magnitude of improvement. The common solution was a multiple conversion/ fixed HFO/ narrow-range PTO/ high first IF/ low last IF design, as pioneered by Collins. The signal flow of the receiver remained essentially unchanged from the 1930s, as it still does in today's superheterodynes.

Transmitters, however, needed a complete rethinking. For most hams, transmitters had always been more fun than receivers They were simpler, and way easier to work on. Also, they tended to look like serious equipment, which they were. They could even kill you. Most transmitters were relatively simple oscillator/ multiplier/ driver/ PA chains, with class B modulators.

However, SSB required considerably more complex designs, with filters or phase-shift networks to get rid of the carrier and unwanted sideband. Modulation took place at low level, early in the signal chain, and this modulated signal was heterodyned to the working frequency. PA's were set linear, instead of the more efficient class C. This design approach involved severe compromises to AM operation, and to a lesser extent CW, both of which are still way more fun on the 'boat anchors.' The ham radio became a complex mass of critically aligned circuits, best adjsted by trained techs. The average ham, even the technically aware one, couldn't just tweak a tx by ear anymore.

Even so, the 60s began the gradual acceptance of small, self-contained transceivers, which could share a lot of the same mixer and filter circuits. Within a decade, these had replaced the roomfuls of equipment once associated with short wave radio. By the mid-70s, vacuum tubes remained a viable design approach only in the largest, external, linears, where they were a cheap, rugged alternative to high current, solid-state devices. Boat anchor linears, using heavy-duty components and commercial-grade output tubes, are very much with us today.

The rest is history.

Here are some manufacturers that boat anchor collectors should look out for:

• Barker & Williamson (NEW!)
• Central Electronics
• Collins Radio Company
• E. F. Johnson Company
• Gonset Company
• Hallicrafters
• Hammarlund
• The Heath Company
• National Radio Company
• R. L. Drake

B&W picked up after the war with its small VFO/exciter, which led quickly to the mighty 5100 series of AM/CW boxes in the fifties. These very formidable, grey, rack-size transmitters used the then-new 6146. There were two in the final, and two more in the class B, high-level modulator. Here was an AM box with some balls!

Of course, when sideband came in, the 5100 had to be adapted, and it was, courtesy of the 51-SB, an equally neat-looking box that stood alongside the main transmitter. The combo did 180W PEP on sideband, using the phasing method. Later, there was a 5100-B, with its 51SB-B.

Your roomful of equipment was rounded out by the LPA-1, a grounded grid linear, actually an ultra-linear, using two 813s in triode connection with inverse feedback. The LPA-1 sat on your desk. Its hulking HV supply, with its four 866s in a full-wave bridge, did not, unless you had a bigger desk than normal humans. The mercury in this thing is practically enough to make your home a haz-mat site in itself. Even so, this 2 kW PEP amp was made until the late sixties, sometimes in kit form.

These are interesting circuit designs. This must have been a pretty nice sounding kW.

In 1961, the 5100 was replaced by a big, rather strange box, the B&W 6100. Its case and panel matched the LPA-1 perfectly, as did its 100 watt output, CW or PEP. Internally, it looks like a pretty decent rig, with crystal sideband filters and 6146 finals.

This radio is guaranteed a place in vacuum-tube lore, due to its use of a true, crystal controlled, frequency synthesizer. This had to be some kind of first for the ham market in general, not just for the tube era. One clunks the typically heroic bandswitch into position, then dials in the working frequency by turning three knobs on a black panel at the center of the otherwise grey box. These go to a couple of tube VXOs, a comparator, and an RF amp.

Needless to say, the 6100 was an expensive rig, and ahead of its time. According to Raymond S. Moore, only 200 were made. A friend of mine has one. So there.

B&W always had a whole line of amateur-grade accessories. Their TR switch, that allowed full break-in on CW, was popular. They still make antenna switches and such, plus a rather expensive, wide-coverage, dipole that sells well to the military. You can have one too, for only U.S. $100.

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The 10A improved on an earlier product, from another company, that was called the SSB Junior. Your occasional 10A turns up at swap meets. It has no VFO, just crystals, and bandswitching is done by opening up a little door and changing coils. It's in a funky little grey box, with MULTIPHASE EXCITER in large letters across half the left side of the radio, flanking two sine waves that are most definitely 90 degrees out of phase.

The 10A was followed in 1954 by an improved version, the 10B, in a slightly larger box, and the 20A, a higher-powered version with more features. It has a band switch, and at the top there is a magic-eye tube.

The Central Electronics transmitters that everyone wants today are the later 100V and 200V. These are classics, perhaps as close to the state of the vacuum-tube art as anything made. For a start, the rig is completely broadbanded, like a no-tune ricebox of today. That's right. You don't have to tune your transmitter. Of course, this means that the load must be pretty close to 50-75 ohms, as with modern rigs. I suppose you could use an antenna tuner, and lose a bit on the convenience side.

The PA, using the ultra-linear 6550 audio tubes in class AB1, is rated at 100W PEP on both radios. The CE200V is a somewhat later version of the 100V, with the same basic design but a lot of new tubes and features, giving it just about every bell and whistle anyone ever put into a tube transmitter.

Both the 100V and 200V come in a heavy, impressive box, classic Collins grey, with a simplified control layout of two knobs, a turret dial, and two knobs. Other controls are behind two sturdy, spring-loaded doors. They're pretty much all set-and-forget.

The PTO has a very fine tuning step for a tube radio. To its left is a large meter, to its right a nifty modulation 'scope. This rig cost $800 in 1950s money, more than a lot of used cars, and you still needed a receiver. It was probably worth it, though. People will hock their children for these now. It's a great rig, if not one for the faint hearted. It's probably hell to work on, but it's a thing of beauty.

At the time, the broadband coupler in the PA output circuit was regarded as black magic. Engineers for other companies would open up their 200Vs and try to see what made these couplers work. CE, however, had potted the whole thing in what looked a bit like dirty cement, requiring its total destruction to get to the guts. One was rewarded by a few bent, useless coils, which by then looked as if a car had run them over. There must have been a few 200Vs around with permanently tuned outputs, since CE would not replace these couplers without a darn good reason.

Finally, there was a matching desktop linear, the 600L, with a single 813 in class AB2 running about 600W PEP. Yes, this was broadband too, in and out. You still didn't tune your radio. Think about these beautiful tube rigs, designed in the late 50s, the next time someone tells you what an advance the no-tune riceboxes were.

These were definitely radio man's radios, engineer's radios, and consequently they sold to a niche market. Central Electronics became a wholly owned subsidiary of Zenith in 1959, with Schum staying on as a VP. Zenith management probably had trouble relating to such a high-end, low-volume product. In 1962, they abruptly discontinued the entire CE line, terminating it with extreme prejudice. There were wails of grief from hams, but that was that.

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Collins sold gear for aircraft, expeditions, and the like from the start, a history exploited by their series of 'wing' logos. When it came time to modernize Air Force communication, Collins was the logical choice. It didn't hurt that Curtis Le May and Art Collins were ham buddies.

Larger rigs, like the Collins broadcast and commercial transmitters, are perhaps the ultimate boat anchors. Like the ones made by RCA, Gates, Continental and the others, they are built to pump out photons on a 24/7 schedule, forever, with proper maintenance. They were, and are, incredibly expensive, often exceeding the cost of the buildings housing them, and they were, and are, ridiculously overdesigned for amateur use. They come in black, ominous racks, with meters all along the top, and windows where the operator can peer in and make sure the PA tubes are glowing the proper shade of red. An example is the KW-1, perhaps the most formidable looking kilowatt ever made, which cost $5000 in the 1950s, when a veteran could buy a house for $15k.

One Collins military design, the R-390/390A, pretty much started boat anchor collecting. While something like 25 companies made these 80-pound, milspec boxes, Collins designed it in the first place. Their '390s are still the most sought.

The R-390 uses digital tuning, through an awesome network of gears and mechanical counters. Since it was intended for use over public address systems, to play broadcasts to the troops, it has no audio output stage. (A rugged home stereo works fine.) Nor does it have a product detector for SSB, though an expensive, outboard adaptor is available. The R-390 is becoming ridiculously overpriced, on the surplus market, but a tested and guaranteed one still makes a good, first boat anchor. You'll never go back to your rice box again.

In the fifties, Collins got back into the civilian market with the 75A- series of receivers, and its matching 32V- amateur transmitters. Later, there was the 32W-1, a similar transmitter intended as an exciter. This one could be given a larger final and a power supply/ pedestal the size of a bar refrigerator, at which point it became a KWS-1, self-contained kilowatt on SSB and CW. The 75A-4/KWS-1 combo was a formidable looking station, at a formidable price, so hams started calling these "the gold dust twins." If you had to ask the price, you couldn't afford it.

The 75A-4 is a great radio. It was the new state of the art at the time, and some companies spent the rest of the vacuum tube era catching up. You could get an enormous speaker, the 312A-1, that wasn't that much smaller than the receiver. The whole thing made one of the most listenable radios ever made, way better than 99% of ultra-speced solid state boxes with their zillion dB dynamic ranges.

Any of these old Collins are great boat anchors. They're big, and they have some advanced circuits for their time. The receivers were the first to use narrow segments with a precise PTO for tuning, changing bands by switching in 300 or 500 kHz ranges. Collins also made the industry standard mechanical filters that just about everyone used in their 455 kHz second IFs.

Collins tube radios, with their large, black boxes, and covered with lights, dials and knobs, are among the most purposeful looking radios ever made. Most of the public still sees them on the sets of old movies and TV shows, along with the larger racks by Collins and Motorola. These have therefore pretty much formed the popular image of what really high-powered radios ought to look like, having won wars, gone to the moon, and maybe even shot down your occasional UFO.

The military wasn't ignored, with the high-priced 51J- and 51S- series of receivers, thousands of which were sold. The 51S- was transitional to Collins' later S-line, the sleek, miniaturized (by boat anchor standards) series of HF radios that redefined the medium in the 1960s.

For amateurs, the S-line meant the 75S- series of receivers and 32S- transmitters. The transmitter made good use of the compact 6146, a hot-rod beam pentode roughly derived from the 6L6, that became an industry standard. The receiver continued the "gold dust" design that remained the state of the amateur art.

There was also a heavy-duty linear, the 30S-1, which stood on the floor and looked like a sleeker KWS-1. Finally, there was the popular 30L-1 linear, which used 811As in a horizontal position, in a box the same size as other S-line components. It was one of the first real, desktop KWs. This made it possible to put your whole S-line on a desk that looked like a desk, as opposed to a door and three sawhorses. Along with similar gear from R. L. Drake, these radios got away from the 'battleship' look of the 50s, while not compromising performance.

Finally, Collins made a similar-looking transceiver, the KWM-2, which was expensive but very desireable, especially for CAP and MARS. All of these radios came with a huge number of accessories, third-party mods and goodies.

Any old-time ham has very personal feelings about the Collins S-line. It was a hell of a good radio, and everybody wanted one, but, once again, the price was always just a little beyond the means of the average hobbyist with a mortgage and/or family. A lot of dreaming, and drooling, went on. It is no wonder that the mystique lasts to this day, giving the S-line an almost obscene resale value. It's worth it. It's still a great radio, and a viable choice for the real radio freak who doesn't mind scrounging parts and opening a box now and again.

Collins is still making very nice, usually cutting-edge, equipment, mostly for the military. Art Collins, W0CXX, the founder and long-time owner, died in 1987, a wealthy man. His ham callsign is now being used by the Rockwell-Collins Employees Amateur Radio Club at the company's home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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After the war, Johnson came out with the classic boat anchor transmitter. To honor his Scandinavian heritage, he named it the Viking. It became the Viking II, and then led to the Viking Valiant/ Valiant II, with three 6146s instead of two, which was made until 1965. The Valiant also had an SSB adaptor, giving an honest 275 watts PEP input. The Viking I and II were your typical enormous, rack-sized boxes, made like something you'd put on a bank vault, with a meter and an ominous little dial hole in the middle. They made an external VFO that was popular. Then you had two ominous little dial holes.

The Valiant, and most later Johnson transmitters, went the other way, with the coolest VFO dials you'll ever see, and generally a very purposeful looking radio. The I series used dark browns and blacks, while the IIs went to a more contemporary (in 1960) grey and tan. These are beautiful radios. Everyone should have at least one.

The Viking line was well received, and no wonder, because it was an awfully good transmitter. A smaller version of the Valiant, called the Ranger/ Ranger II, was made at the same time, having a single 6146 and no SSB adaptor. It was just about the best little rig available to novices (I liked mine, and the VFO gave me incentive to upgrade). A larger rig, the 500, had an external power supply, bigger finals, and an 811A modulator, for 500 honest AM/CW watts. I believe the sideband adaptor worked with this rig too. The "6N2," a transverter, got you up on, uh, six and two.

One e-mailer wanted me to put in the Thunderbolt, a 2000W PEP linear made in the 60s. Sounds good to me. Actually, I can't believe I'd forget that one. It was a true desktop kW, if you had a very strong desk, with continuous coverage from 3.5 to 30 MHz. It switched to class C for CW, where 20W in got you the legal plate input, plus a wee bit more. In AM linear mode, it did an honest 800W input, pretty good for 33% efficiency.

Johnson also made a "6N2 Thunderbolt." 5 watts SSB/DSB in got you 1200W to the finals in class AB1, and six watts CW got you a happy kW of class C input on your favorite weak signal channel. Of course, you could not wear the 6N2 Thunderbolt on your belt at swap meets.

Finally, Johnson made a couple of small transmitters aimed at novices, a couple of middle-sized transmitters like the Pacemaker, a 500W desktop linear called the Courier, and a couple of huge transmitters aimed at people who, uh, wanted huge transmitters. The earliest of these was the Viking Kilowatt, an ominous, square, grey box standing some 4 feet high, 3 feet wide and 5 feet deep, with controls on top, and generally looking more like a VAX than a radio. Since it was 'only' an amplifier, Johnson made a matching, metal desk which attached to the side, and gave a place to put your exciter, receiver, and yourself.

You've heard of The Smart Desk. Well, here was The 1000 Watt Desk. This was not a kW on a desk, it was a desk on a kW. Since there was also a class B modulator in there, your desk had a kW on AM too, if it had to, using 15 watts audio drive.

Later came the Viking Invader, a modernized Valiant with internal SSB generation and 2 6146s. This was a pretty cool rig by itself, but it was also a bit like the old 32W-1, because you could put it on steroids. For about another $700, not chicken feed in those days, your Invader got new finals, an external box for the power supply, a new panel with some more dials, and another meter. Or, you could buy it this way in the first place. Either way, you had an Invader 2000, a self-contained rig that could make legal power, or a wee bit more, on SSB or CW.

It's hard to go wrong with old Johnson transmitters. They're immortal, if you can come by tubes and parts. They work well, and they keep your room nice and warm.

Johnson also made the Match Box, a very highly regarded antenna tuner of a sort they just don't make any more, but everyone wishes they did. There's also a kW Match Box, same thing only bigger. Everybody wants one of these, very very badly. Riots break out at swap meets. Hams sell their wives. It's not pretty, folks.

E.F. Johnson is still very much alive today, employing 650 people and operating a plant in Minnesota. However, it's been losing money, and it's in the process of selling to Transcrypt International Inc., a digital-encryption firm which recently went public. Johnson survives, for now, with a new CEO. The combination of Johnson's awesome RF systems with Transcrypt's advanced software may achieve interesting synergies, as the suits like to say.

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For example, Gonset made an early, HF mobile receiver, the G-66, and a matching transmitter, the G-77, both of which would fit easily under a dashboard. They were cool looking little boxes, kind of like shinier spy radios, with external power supplies and modulators that went somewhere else (the trunk?). They only used AM, but they covered all the HF bands.

In the true boat anchors, Gonset made a series of rather odd looking HF receivers, vaguely reminiscent of the Motorola bases of the era, with funny bent panels, but about a zillionth of the workmanship of Motorola's commercial-grade gear. The full-size, Gonset transmitters were more conventional looking, in the standard battleship-style boxes. There was the GSB-100 exciter/transmitter, and the GSB-101 linear. Later on, a smaller desktop linear, the GSB-201 series, got the legal input from 4 811As.

The Commander series was for portable HF use, with a rather purposeful looking transmitter and receiver, in small boxes, with little doors in front. I have never seen one of these. The pictures look cool, like the airport radios of the era.

However, the most famous, and prevalent, Gonset radios were and are the Communicator series of AM transceivers for 6 and 2 meters. Gonset sold a bazillion of these. They were standard issue for Civil Defense/RACES and disaster communication. Both came in the same square, ungainly, metal box, looking a lot like something you'd keep bread in, but with SO-239 coax jacks on top. (This made a good place to screw on a whip antenna, when working outdoors in the field.) Gonset also made an external amplifier, in a matching box, with the inevitable little window to look in and see how the finals (826s?) were doing.

This little radio, known affectionately as the "Goony Box," was cheap to begin with, and even more so used. However, it could stand up to portable use, and it pretty much opened VHF to hams. It's hard to believe now, but most simplex and even duplex on VHF used to be AM. FM was later, when modified Motorola and GE land-mobile gear came into use.

Communicators went through several revisions, with Roman numerals, up to the IV, which had a more "modern" case. Their major competition was the Heathkit Sixer and Twoer, the classic "Benton Harbor Lunch Boxes." The Communicators are neat radios, popular with collectors and AMers. They're immortal. They still come up for sale at times, with or without the nuke-era yellow paint jobs, and/or the round CD logos.

Gonset didn't survive the transition to solid state, but Faust Gonset did. He sold his little company to one of his suppliers, and started an even smaller one, SBE, also in southern California. SBE, for Side Band Engineers, marketed the first truly miniature SSB transceiver. It's tiny, even by modern standards. It had a couple of matching linears, to give a base-station punch, and these weren't much bigger. Thus, the prototype 'ricebox' was not the FT-101. It was the SBE, made right here in these US of A. The radio was ahead of its time.

The Gonset Company was sold again in the late 60s. A decade later, it was gone without a trace. SBE, too, had several owners, and it is now part of Raytheon.

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Hallicrafters collecting is something of a hobby within a hobby, and it's easy to see why. The company always made a whole line of shortwave radios, clear from the bottom-end Sky Buddy, which kids could afford, to the inexpensive (OK, cheap) S-38/S-120, through mid-priced equipment, to gee-whiz high-tech gear which looked and sounded as formidable as anything ever made anywhere.

The result is a dizzying array of Sky Buddies, Sky Riders, Sky Couriers, Sky Trainers and Sky just about everything else, all aimed at the consumer market, and in addition all the numbered models that could be used in the home or the shack. The company sold an awful lot of radios. They turn up in some very unlikely places. For example, the 'air band radio' seen in the office on Wings is an old Hallicrafters receiver, though they made a real aero radio that is something of a classic as well.

Anyone making this sheer volume of gear needs to make certain compromises, especially if they like staying in business. Hallicrafters tended to use generic, mass produced parts, which is good news and bad news today. The good news is that there are fewer custom parts for the restorer to locate. The bad news is that many a collector or user has opened up their Hallicrafters and recoiled. It looks like a cheap Silvertone in there!

Even so, Hallicrafters made some incredible radios. An example is the legendary DD-1, an entertainment receiver that looks more like a 1930's movie space ship control panel. It's a double-diversity radio, covered with dials and meters. Not that many were sold, making the DD-1 a real prize.

Hallicrafters also made some great transmitters. The ham line started with the prewar HT-1, which used the same case as the DD-1. The postwar HT-32/32B line is a classic, as is the HT-37. The '32s are definitely in the best boat anchor tradition, weighing at least 85 pounds, and they are excellent radios. The HT-37 was guite a bit lighter (I could carry mine by myself, though just barely), mostly because Hallicrafters had skimped on the power supply and the materials used in the case. However, the HT-37 is highly prized today, because its audio section, with phasing-mode sideband generation, is one of the nicest sounding rigs ever made. Use a suitable mike, like the high-Z D-104 without the preamp, keep the gain down, and you can be confident of having the best SSB audio on the band.

As noted, the lower-grade Hallicrafters equipment is highly collectable, but some of it is anything but rare. For example, the SX-28 is not really much of a radio, but it looks impressive, and people will tell you it's a rare, old set. Actually, many thousands were made. Watch out for price gougers!

Many Hallicrafters general-coverage receivers, and even the top-line SX-101/101A, had what became something of a trademark for this company, namely the giant, etched glass, slide-rule dial. If you break one of these, you will need to cannibalize another radio for a replacement. They are practically church windows.

The largest such dial was probably on the popular SX-62, an entertainment receiver which covered .540 to 108 MHz, continuously. This was a living room version of the turret dialed SX-42, which was itself derived from countermeasures receivers made in the war. The '62 has the classic, shortwave dial, reminiscent of what Zenith put on the Trans-Oceanic, covered as it was with markers for Rome, Paris, Moscow, and other cities which may or may not have ever actually broadcast there. The SX-62 and 62A are extremely complicated sets, hard as hell to work on, but I've actually used one for a ham radio, with an external relay to bypass the antenna and speaker. The crystal filter does a nice job, though if anyone bumps the radio, your station is gone forever. It's also a great set for MW AM DX, with the right antenna.

Also look out for Hallicrafters speakers, the R- series. These are huge, and have the trademark lower-case h in the grill. They match the output impedances of the receivers, and just generally look cool.

Hallicrafters also made some classic consumer gear. The aforementioned diversity receiver was an audiophile unit, 1930s style. When TV came in Hallicrafters made a desktop set with a small screen and radio-style push buttons. This TV is really hip right now, and you see it in a lot of design books. They study its looks in art schools.

Even though Hallicrafters made most of the short wave radios used by the public in the 50s, they never quite got untracked after WW II. Ultimately, they lost out to companies with more clout in the defense industry. In the amateur market, Collins and Drake left them in the lurch. Hallicrafters had a succession of new owners, and now appears to have completely dissolved. Bill Halligan died recently, at age 93.

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Hammarlund got into transmitters in the 50s and 60s, with its HX- series. The first ones were obviously intended as companions to the HQ- line of receivers, as the cases are quite similar. Just about all tube transmitters had turret dials for their VFOs, but Hammarlund's had a slide-rule dial more like what Hallicrafters put on its receivers. The later Hammarlund transmitters, plus the high-power, external linears, look quite a bit beefier, but they weren't big sellers and I don't know anything about them.

The HQ- receivers were large, though not really heavy, and they always seemed to have these weird, electric clocks in one corner, matching the large S-meter in the other. I guess the clock looked nice. It was an extra-cost option, so you see a lot of radios with just a logo here. Yuk.

Hammarlund's top line, the Super Pro series, is the kind of thing that makes radio freaks drool. It never changed that much. It just got better. The best one is the last one, the redoubtable SP-600. Following the R-390, it's probably the receiver that defined the boat anchor scene. Plenty of these were made, mostly for military and commercial use.

While the circuit is pretty standard, and far from state of the art, it's an interesting implementation. Bandswitching is by a turret-style tuner, resembling the ones in old TVs. The SP-600J has JAN (military grade) parts, and there is also an SP-600JX with extra crystal positions, and a -JLX, and a -VLF, both of which tune lower frequencies.

Like the R-390, this is no radio for the faint-hearted. It's rock-solid, built for the ages, and rock-heavy. It could probably derail a train. It looks the way a real HF radio ought to look, and a restored and tested one is another good first BA. Be warned, however, that it will force a certain redefinition of your living space, after you and at least one friend get it home. Like the R-390, it's art, but it's also kind of a guy thing.

Hammarlund held out, defiantly, for boat-anchor designs until the last. They did try to market solid state gear to hams, but it didn't sell. Like Hallicrafters, the company went through a succession of owners before simply disappearing without a trace in the 70s.

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After the war, Heath got into electronics with a low-cost oscilloscope kit using military surplus parts. Kit building became a popular pastime, not to mention a way to save some big bucks on equipment, and Heath's catalog came to include everything from electronic toys to TV sets, complete hi-fi systems, and eventually even computers.

Heath always had two ham lines, one aimed at beginners, and one for the old-timer looking for a good rig at a good price. The beginner's gear was rudimentary, used few tubes, and typically cost next to nothing even in 50s and 60s money. Any kid could get on the air with this stuff, and a lot of them did. Just about everybody had a DX-40 around somewhere.

The old timer gear was usually solid, using tried and true designs. Sometimes these were pretty close to other products that had proven successful in ham use. Open up a DX-100, and you'll find a pretty good imitation of the Johnson Viking. Both of these were workhorse transmitters on AM and CW, and the DX-100 had a later SSB adapter.

In the 60s, Heath modernized its look, with a sleeker DX-60 transmitter, a matching receiver, and some big rigs named after Indian tribes. The Apache was kind of a hot-rod DX-100, and a popular boat anchor. It was followed by the more advanced (and harder to build) Marauder. There were linears, the Chippewa and Warrior, and the RX-1 Mohawk, a receiver.

Unless a piece of gear was really complex, which it hardly ever was, the ham boxes came in kit form only. Thus every Heath boat anchor out there was built by some guy, in his garage or basement, with a soldering iron, a screwdriver, and a couple of little wrenches that Heath usually included.

This dictated a certain approach to mechanical and electrical design. "We won't let you fail," was one of their slogans. The gear, especially the older transmitters, is usually pretty easy to work on, and there are a million mods out. Of course, it also means that some of these boat anchors will look like art works inside, while others will have solder splashed in funny places, or black tape around melted insulation from when smoke came out the first time. Caveat emptor!

The later SB- series turns up at swap meets all the time. These look a lot like the Collins S-line, but with green panels and chrome knobs and about one-fifth the workmanship. A couple of linears, the SB-200 and SB-220, are still very popular. The 200 is about the size and power of the Collins 30L-1, but with much different controls and tubes. The 220 is a 200 on steroids, in a fatter box, and using 3-500Zs. There have been hundreds of articles with good 220 mods, mostly for stability and more RF choking at lower frequencies. The 220 remains a viable choice for the experienced BA type who understands the safety hazards of such high powered equipment, who won't blow himself/herself up, and who wants to make some serious RF, cheap.

Heath also made some interesting little transceivers, the Tener, Sixer and Twoer. These AM monobanders were also called the "Benton Harbor Lunch Boxes," which gives a pretty good idea of their size and shape. They even had little handles on top. Heath sold an awful lot of these, getting a lot of people onto the higher bands.

Heath was bought by Daystrom in the 50s, and then by Zenith. Gradually, as electronic gear became too complex to build from a pile of parts in a garage, the company shifted into computers, robotics and advanced home automation products. Heath discontinued its last kits a couple of years ago, and now has only a couple of items of interest to radio types.

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After selling advanced HF/VHF radios to airlines and the government, National entered the ham market with a popularly priced line of regenerative receivers. Then, in 1935, they introduced our third classic boat anchor, the mighty HRO. This series survived, with circuit refinements, until 1964, and it was popular and respected the whole time. That's a long run for a radio that never really stopped looking like an orange crate!

The HRO had a number of special parts, as designed by none other than James Millen, most apparent being the huge, steel, tuning dial that came to symbolize National radios. This dial had little windows. When you turned it, the 100-kc (no Hertz yet!) would increment inside the windows, in the dial, while you read off the individual kc on the dial's outside. This awesome mass of chrome and steel looked like an ash tray, and it was made like the Great Pyramids.

Even more remarkable was the band switch. Millen had a hand in here, as well. None of these crummy wafer switches, or coil banks, or turrets to oxidize and go out of alignment. To change bands on any HRO, the operator opens two spring-loaded clamps that could go on a bank vault, and pulls out a coil array something like 3 inches by 6 inches by 4 inches deep. Basically, you disembowel your radio. The huge coils are slid into the shelf box that lives next to every HRO, the proper new ones are slid out of the box, at which point you stick the new assembly back into the radio, where it seats with a satisfying ker-THOK. The spring clamps are snapped shut, and away you go. Now this is a radio!

Millen, a mechanical engineer, moved on to his own parts company, which ran its whole catalog in the Radio Amateur's Handbook until the ARRL dropped all the ads. His stuff always looked pretty dramatic; the kind of technology that won World War II. Not flashy; just immortal.

The newest and best of the tube HROs are the HRO-50 and HRO-60. Either one is made like a locomotive, and either will make yet another fine addition to the boat anchor collection, though it might also get you a divorce. They're rectangular boxes, heavy, heavy, heavy, with ominous slits along the top for the sliderule dial scale, and that redoubtable HRO tuner just below. There's an S-meter on the left, and the usual plethora of dials and knobs. Do get the matching speaker, if you can.

The last HRO was the redesigned, solid state, fully synthesized HRO-500. It is reputed to be a very good radio, in fact a classic, but I've never seen one. It came along too late to save National's ham line, and not that many were sold.

One of National's few transmitters was the NTX-30, before the war. It's supposed to be a nice unit, but I've never seen one. Another was the NCL-2000, a desktop linear marketed in the 60s. This had a nice, purposeful look, and the components that I can see look pretty heavy-duty.

The last National tube box that I know much about is the NC-270. Advertised in the 60s as "the red-hot set with the cool blue look," it was the successor to the ham-band-only NC-300 and -303. For the first time, though, the radio was of less than battleship dimensions. It had a sliderule dial a la Hallicrafters and a "cosmic blue" case that tilted up for ergonomics. I got to use one of these. It's a nice enough set, with big controls that click satisfyingly into place, but otherwise nothing special.

National left the ham business soon after, surviving on government contracts until going chapter 11 in the 80s. It hung on, barely, until 1991, when the last vestiges were sold off in an IRS foreclosure.

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Drake started by selling filters to the military in World War II. These were good filters, and when interference from ham radios to TV sets became a problem after the war, they were easily adapted. I wish that I had kept my old TV-1000LP and its high-pass companion, that an Elmer had given me when I was learning ham radio. They beat anything made now.

While Collins got all the credit for revolutionizing ham radio, Drake was actually there first, with its line of miniature SSB receivers, the 1A, 2, 2A and 2B. These looked a bit like toys, especially when put alongside the heavy metal of the era, but they used advanced circuitry similar to the Collins, and they tuned SSB like real champs. The 2B was especially well received.

Drake's numbering convention continues to this day. The first model in a new line gets a new sequential number, like an airplane, and then the refinements get letters. It is always chronological.

Next, Drake got into transceivers, the TR-3 and 4. I sound like a broken record, but the TR-4/ 4A is a neat radio, with its little square box, and its external speaker/power supply. There was also an accessory RV-4, which added another VFO. Right now, there are plenty of these transceivers at swap meets, and they can easily be restored and put right back onto the air. It's a simple, little radio that does simple, little things, but at this price I'll take one over the cheapest, and rather wretched, riceboxes any day.

Next, Drake issued its famous 4-line of separates. They really hit their stride here. First came the R-4, and the T-4, a companion 'reciter' without a VFO, for slaving to the receiver. With the R-4A came the T-4X, a transmitter in its own right, with its own VFO/PTO plus transceive capability, like the Collins. Further improvements were made in the R-4B/T-4XB, and R-4C/T-4XC. There was also a linear, the L-4B and L-4C, with full legal output, and a couple of shortwave receivers, the prized SPR-4 and the broadcast-oriented SW-4. The 4-line had a mindboggling array of accessories, from filters (of course!) to external frequency synthesizers (the FS-4), antenna tuners (the well regarded MN-2000), RTTY terminals, control consoles and generally just about any commercially viable idea that the engineers could think up.

There's been some debate over whether the 4-line should really count as a boat anchor. It was transitional; a hybrid design. Each revision had fewer tubes and more solid state devices. In size and weight, these were more like dinghy anchors, though the PS-1 power supply could at least keep a car from rolling.

Amazingly, the 4-line is still a viable choice today. It's about the best value on the used market. It lacks the Collins mystique, but also the Collins prices. I'm using one as my primary station right now, and I'd stack it up against any ricebox made. My experience comes close to what I feel when using the better Kenwood radios, like the TS-940 and 950, and the Drake is even about the same size! Operating the 4-line feels a lot like using the Collins S-line, minus the reasurring sturdiness of the Collins. About the only time this becomes a technical drawback is with the finicky "sweep tube" final of the T4X series, as compared to the 6146s in the Collins.

Furthermore, the R-4 may be the most listenable ham receiver ever made. It's like getting a better antenna, or moving to a desert island. The filters in the R-4B and C differ, and both have their adherents, but to my ears the R-4B is the winner. You simply don't get tired from using this radio, even in all-night contest QRM. In fact, many hard-core contesters and DXers hung onto their 4-lines until only a couple of years ago, when computer automation of logging, duping, band changing, etc. required more sophisticated transceivers.

After this came the 7-line, all solid state, and in a redesigned, spacey, blue motif. The TR-7 was a ham transceiver, with a power supply in a matching case, and the R-7 was a very good, general coverage, fully synthesized receiver with a similar look. Like the R-4, the R-7 has its fanatics, who won't listen to anything else. It's a winner, even though it is rather hard to tune. Once again, Drake just kept getting out every kind of high-tech, or even just plain gee-whiz, accessory anyone could ever imagine.

This period also had some rare, amazing radios, such as the UV-3. This transceiver had modules that put it on as many as 3 VHF/UHF bands at once, run from an advanced control head that has been hacked, interfaced, and adapted for more remote bases than seems possible. The UV-3 was at least 10 years ahead of its time. Japanese companies are just about now catching up.

In the 80s, Peter Drake, who had replaced his late father, got the company into satellite TV receivers. These were made with typical Drake quality. The demand was huge, and Drake dropped all of its other products to concentrate on them. This led to an epic closeout sale at ham stores.

It was not known whether the company would ever come back to the amateur/SWL market, but it did. The new R-8/8A/8B is a serious comm receiver, apparently on a par with anything Drake ever made. There's also a high-performance, 2-meter, all-mode transceiver. It has 440 receive, packet and satellite capability, and (again) more accessories than seem possible. Can an HF transceiver be far behind?

The real surprise is that Drake still supports all its old equipment, within reason, pending availability