[ARC5] 1960's PRC Radios

[Robert Eleazer]

Back in 1973 our AFROTC unit got a ride in US Army UH-1's. While waiting to board the Huey I saw a radio of some kind sitting on the ground and noted that it was and "RT-841/PRC-77." I always recalled that.

Well, now I have two of those little honeys.  I bought both on ebay and both were missing the outer case.  Don't pay the prices of ebay for those cases; Murphyjunk has band new overhauled perfect condition outer cases for $29 plus $8 shipping to the east coast.  The first PRC-77 received but did not transmit.  After doing some checks I decided I would hook it up to my Tektronix scope/counter and see if it was putting out anything at all.  I was surprised  to see the scope showed it as right on the frequency, a good clean signal, and with a lot of RF voltage.  I hooked it to a length of alligator test lead as an antenna and found it transmitted across the hangar to a scanner loud and clear.  Tests with a dummy load and CB wattmeter showed 2.5W output.  I guess the testing woke up the transmitter.  If you screw around with something long enough you'll either fix it or break it worse. 

The second PRC-77 turned out to have a bad 1 MHZ oscillator.  I bought a replacement and now it works fine.  Transmit is like the first one and receive seems to be better.

A PRC I was very impressed with is the PRC-66, a 220 - 400 MHZ portable that is quite small, less than half the size of a PRC-41, I think..  I bid on a brand new one at surplus sales at Tinker AFB in the mid-70's but did not get it.  I was amazed that they were selling it as surplus while base ops had a big ARC-34 or something filling up the back of a station wagon.

Several years ago I saw a PRC-47 in working condition at a hamfest for about $120.  Kinda wish I had bought it, but I thought the frequency range was too limited.  I wanted to be able to get 20M, at least.

Wayne
WB5WSV             
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