[ARC5] [Milsurplus] ASV radar for a PBY

[Hubert Miller]

In the years 1995 - 1997 I lived in Salt Lake City, a beautiful place with so much to recommend it, as so many others have since also discovered. But the current Southwest 1000 year drought dissuades me from considering moving back to the Southwest. Anyway, on
moving there, I soon began looking for "surplus" outlets. There was a place in the west of the city, I think around 17th South, called
'Salt Lake Instrument'. The place might have at one time worked on 'instruments' of some sort but now the owner mostly lived from
selling from his vast stock of vacuum tubes and an occasional surplus deal. He said he had a buyer from Japan who would come over
once a year and buy from his warehouse. I also saw some thermoelectric generators he said came from the State of Utah, like the 
Park Department or police or something. Those he was selling for $250, maybe even more. The back lot of his building had about 
1/4 acre "yard" and it was like a corn maze but made of various electronics stacked about chest high with a narrow U shaped path
through it from the back door of the business. I still recall that sitting on the yard fence somehow was a G.R. instrument of some 
kind, in a wooden box, but the instrument had been out in winters long enough that the corners of the wood box had all come 
apart and so the whole was just sitting there like some skeleton found in the desert. Overall the electronics was in surprisingly
good condition after possibly a decade or maybe decades out in the weather. Utah has a climate quite dry and low humidity and
when it rains, it rains maybe a half day at most and then the sidewalks are dry in a half hour. Here in the Pacific Northwest, 
electronics stored outside like that, would be ruined totally in one season. I am sure this business is long since gone and the 
electronics gone to scrap metal. But - apropos of this conversation, I did see several boxes nameplated "ASV".  These were black
boxes, ATR format like the ASB but perhaps a bit longer. I thought at the time, "someone" should maybe be preserving these, but
I did not and could not assume that task. So it goes, so it went. I also recall finding the base of an AS-81 ( I think it was ) loop 
directional antenna used with the BC-312. I hid it among the rest of the stuff for a return visit and search. On my next visit, I found
the loop antenna for it, but....the base unit had disappeared !  I also recall coming back into the building, and the owner was taking
apart something. I saw it was a TBX radio. I asked what he was doing and he replied, "These relays have valuable metals on the 
contacts." "Non compos mentis". Anyway I instead bought the radio for $35, without relays. ( My brother has it now to sell for me 
and I found spare RFE relays here for it. )  
Maybe a decade before that I had several ASB components, some NIB the rest in unboxed unused condition. I am sure  I had a couple
of the antennas too. I sold all this stuff to someone in Colorado. Nice interesting gear but my possessions have to have some utility
to me. 
-Hue Miller,
Newport, Oregon