[ARC5] NDB IDs

[Mike Morrow]

Jeep wrote:

> In the old days, of course, before the VOR system came along, NDBs and
> Adcock ranges were the bee's knees.  I recall as a kid, and a new ham
> in the late 50's, listening to the A/N Adcock range near Millville NJ.
> In fact, that range was one of the last ones on the East Coast to be 
> decommissioned.

In my last posting, I lamented being a few years too late for the era
of US Adcock ranges.  I read somewhere that they were all gone in the
USA by 1961.

> BTW, I've still got an LF/MF airways chart from the 40's.  Its neat
> to see how it was done in days of yore.....

I have several of such charts from the late 1930s to the late 1950s.
It's great to think back on a time that that the most essential piece
of avionics, the one piece that you'd have if you could only have one,
was the simple 200 to 400 kHz beacon band receiver which allowed one
to follow the Adcock A-N ranges across the country without a loop antenna
and to get terminal information and sometimes weather information from
broadcasts made on 278 kHz or thereabouts.  Add a 3105 (later 3023.5)
kHz AM transmitter and you could talk to the tower.  Add a MF loop
antenna and BC band coverage and a whole new menu of direction finding
was available, not to mention BC band entertainment.

There were many all-in-one sets that did all of that shortly after WWII.
The GE AS-1B was one of the best.  At $200 in 1946, it cost the equivalent
of $2400 2012 dollars.  Even the little Motorola Airboy beacon band dry
battery set at $30 was the equivalent of today's $350.  I'd have loved
to listen to 278 and 3105 kHz from that era.

73,
Mike / KK5F