[ARC5] What's a Type 185?

[Mike Morrow]

Sandy wrote:

> From the threads that have appeared, I was "wondering: about"......was this 
> the birth of the Motorola Airboy and Airboy Sr.?  I had one of the Airboy 
> Seniors once and fooled with it a bit in a friend's Piper J-3, devoid of any 
> electrical system with it's Continental A-65 engine!  3105 khz and a short 
> wire antenna wasn't conducive for long haul communications!

Certainly the Airboy, which was a 200 to 400 kHz receiver only, filled the
same need that the Type 185/186 did for USN training a few years earlier.

The Airboy Sr. was a considerable enhancement with the addition of the
AM transmitter on 3105 kHz.

There are several of us, including Dave and Lloyd, who find these post-war
light aircraft sets interesting.  My favorite is the GE AS-1B which was
being sold in late 1945.  The receiver covered the beacon band and the
broadcast band, had loop antenna connections, a 1020 Hz AF filter and
utilized an RF stage at the front.  The transmitter was the ever-popular
6V6 PA plate-modulated by a 6V6 on 3105 kHz.  In the early 1950s this
plane-to-tower traffic shifted to 3023.5 kHz which today is allocated
to support SAR service communications.

The Airboy BCB receiver was $30 in 1946.  The AS-1B receiver-transmitter
was $200 in 1946, about $2300 today.  The A.R.C. R-11A BCB receiver was,
IIRC, about $150 new in 1946.

Mike / KK5F