[Collins] Re: black beauty

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer]

I don't know for sure, but for the first case, I think Art would have
bid his preferred component or circuit, telling the customer that Art
knew better than the customer. He did that with the 821A-1 bid. VOA
wanted a transmitter tunable by skilled two men in less than 20 minutes.
We delivered a transmitter tunable by anyone, in less than 20 seconds.
Typically 12 seconds. So one radio could do the work of two by tuning
during a station break. He sold them the autotuned radio for the price
of a more simplistic manually tuned radio. Actually by my estimations
for the price of the purchased parts and materials. So he lost a bunch
of money developing a Collins presence in a new (to Collins) market.

During that development, I built a demonstration box of autotuning, that
was used to demonstrate servo tuned stages to military bigwigs in
Washington DC. A case of showing the customer that Art Collins radio
company did know better than they about equipment performance. There
were already at least two generations of autotuned linears from Collins
in the marketplace.

So for the second case he would have pushed circuits and designs that
did meet ITU or national radio regulations. He'd likely have produced a
radio that met the performance specifications in spades, but at a higher
cost than the customer expected. Generally one can always cascade
filters to improve ITU required spurious emissions reductions. Otherwise
parts shouldn't be a source of a limitation in such emissions unless the
price is being cut to the bone and the parts count minimized.

The PA tubes we used in the 821A-1 were just barely able to make power
while not melting the grids. Trouble is they were the best available
from Eimac for a grid driven tetrode.

After the R-389/390/391 family most Collins communications equipment was
developed as a commercial product meeting military specifications, like
the Tektronix plan after the US military grabbed their early scope plans
and put them out to bid by their competition. Some was developed in
anticipation of specifications, some caused purchase specifications to
be patterned after the equipment. To prevent the military from grabbing
the plans as built for them to take to competitive bid, it was important
that there be commercial sales of the product before the military sales.

73, Jerry, K0CQ
-- 
Entire content copyright Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer.
Reproduction by permission only.