[ARC5] Beige ARC Radios

[Mike Morrow]

J. Forster <jfor at quik.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know (or care to speculate) why the post-war beige colored ARC
> radios, very similar to the ARC-5 series, seem to be of no interest to anyone?
> Is there another list or group devoted to them? They seem to bring almost
> nothing, if any bids at all, on eBay.

I hope someday that we collectors of such stuff will accord these gray-clad units their due as military radio sets.  In the evolution of A.R.C. military radio gear, we have these as the end of the line.  Until then, pick them up cheap and NOS!

Though they often bear commercial A.R.C. Type 12 designations, I'm convinced that there was very little civilian or commercial use of these sets, and that the primary purchaser of these units was overwhelmingly the US military.  Even the sets with commercial name tags on them usually have "U.S. Property" or a FSN or a military contract number on the tag.  They are very expensively built, the multi-unit installations are relatively complex and heavy, and their ease of installation and use suffers, all in comparision to what other commercial aircraft radio manufacturers were delivering to private/commercial aircraft owners at the time.  

My favorite system is the AN/ARC-60 UHF set (R-508/ARC, CV-431A/AR, etc.).  It was still being used in USN T-34 training aircraft at NAS Corpus Christi in the early 1970s.

The five-channel T-363 or -366/ARC (T-11/13) units were installed on most Army UH-1s during the Vietnam era as emergency VHF transmitters.

The A.R.C. Type 15 VOR versions of these sets also appeared in several different versions of the AN/ARN-30(*).

The A.R.C. Type 21 ADF system likewise was a commonly used military set that could be found on Vietnam-era miltary aircraft either in commercial nomenclature or under the military AN/ARN-59 nomenclaure.

There can be little doubt when you see one of these sets, it is a *military* radio, even if it has only civilian name tags.

BTW, even though none of these sets were actually beige, A.R.C.-Cessna did produce in the mid-1960s panel-mounted light aircraft radio gear that had beige paint.  Ugly!  Ugly!  Ugly!

In the early 1960s, A.R.C. produced black-panel light aircraft gear like the RT-317 VHF NAV-COM and R-318 ADF that look quite handsome, and seem to be sturdy and well-designed vacuum-tube sets.

Mike / KK5F