[ARC5] My "ARC-5" Impressions (long)

[gordon white]

Command Sets

     I recall how impressed I was with the first Command receivers I saw 
back in about 1960. I had just gotten interested, technically, in radio, 
and had seen a few other sets that, when seen inside, were a tangle of 
wiring and generally incomprehensible to me.

     I bought a couple of the SCR-274-N receivers in downtown New York 
("Radio Row") and, when, as usual with me, I opened them up, it struck 
me how neatly and artistically they were built. The resistors on the 
four small plates, the plug-in coils, etc. their small size and their 
plug-in design.

     They seemed like pieces of  art deco art.

     When I found that they had been designed and built at Aircraft 
Radio Corp. In Boonton, N.J., right next door to where I grew up, and my 
dad knew the executives at A.R.C., it opened up a fascinating chance to 
look into the stuff, and the rest is history.

     I was always a researcher into history - one of my first 
assignments other than daily coverage at the Paterson, N.J.,Daily News, 
was a series on the Paterson locomotive industry in the 19th century.

     Research, as always, is a bit of a treasure hunt, and you find 
enough pieces of gold to make it satisfying. The history of RFL in the 
early days of radio, the RFL building of Doolittle's radio receiver for 
the first blind landing, the Air Mail fiasco and the Baker Board's 
findings that generated new efforts in improved nav and comm gear, at a 
time when so much was going on in radio - VHF, FM were being developed, 
but A.R.C.'s Type K was the first superhet design for the military. Yes, 
Collins, GE, Westinghouse, etc. were building more advanced equipment 
for the air lines, but it was too heavy for fighter planes of the day.

     The Type K, to me, was just so elegant, in conception and layout. I 
was entranced.

     Of course A.R.C. was outclassed by the big boys in vhf  (though I 
never thought the Western Electric VHF stuff was elegant in the way the 
R-112/113 receivers were, as obsolete as they were when built)

     The R-1021/ARN30-D receiver, 90 channels, crystal-controlled, was 
the final gasp of the Type K form factor, and elegant in at least that 
way - crammed into the same "box" as the AN/ARC-5 receivers.

     A.R.C. was paralleled in my other love, auto racing, by Harry A. 
Miller's beautiful twin-cam, supercharged, front-wheel drive racing cars 
of the 1920s. Miller's shop was never more than essentially a cottage 
industry. When he went bankrupt in the early 1930s his head machinist, 
Fred Offenhauser took over the business and Offenhauser engines, later 
built by equally small Meyer & Drake, dominated the top level of 
American racing into the late 1970s until the giant Ford Motor Company 
got into racing, along with the big bucks of Goodyear and Firestone and 
did to the Offy engine what Collins, et al, did to A.R.C.

     Apple, of course, started small but quickly grew. When I was 
interested in computers in the 1970s there were a lot of small 
experimenters (including, in a way, me) but Jobs and Gates were smart 
enough to grow and swamp many of the other guys working out of garages - 
so it goes. A.R.C.'s decision not to take government money to grow big 
early in WW II eventually sealed their fate.

  - Gordon Eliot White