[Milsurplus] RAL-7

[Barry Hauser]

Hue wrote:
> One odd thing i saw was an ad in a postwar Radio News, somewhere in
> 1947-1950 range, an ad for the RAK only, and factory-new. I wonder
> how they came to have the RAK surplus only??  Price was $49.50,
> which was pretty good bucks then. -Hue Miller

A lot of these are in very good shap even now -- mostly the grundiness, if 
any, is from storage.  I have a number of them - -mostly RAK's -- that look 
unused in terms of wear on knobs, panels and mechanics.

It may well be that they were either not made in equal numbers or were 
manufactured in equal numbers, but not installed equally.  Possibly some 
other receiver took over for HF purposes and a lot of RAK's were left 
sitting in crates?  The crates may have been discarded to save space or sell 
separately for re-use, and perhaps, that's why the installation hardware 
(like the other half of that strain relief) disappeared, even for the 
factory-new ones.

The installed units may not have made it off the ship before the guys with 
the cutting torches arrived.

Of course, these are regens and superhets would be preferred by hams and 
hobbiests - and preferably dual and triple conversion.  These are 
"no-conversion".  Actually, though old 30's design even by 1941, they 
ironically parallel the features of the most modern equipment.  Direct 
conversion (avoids birdies, etc.) and DSP -- only it was ASP -- analogue 
signal processing -- with those robust filter arrangements.  The proven 
'30's take-no-chances technolgy means that most of the components are still 
good, if not all 60 plus years later.  No cutting/bleeding edge materials 
used -- like new fangled plastic molded paper capacitors, fistfuls of 
teardrop tantalums, low tube count and none of those miniatures with the 
pins that get bent, no surface mount electrolytics that leak acid and take 
out the circuit board traces, etc.  Also, low maintenance -- no pesky 
alignment and calibration.  If a particular frequency is at particular 
arbitrary spot on the arbitrary dial, just jot it down on the handy dandy 
chart.   Highly updateable -- if the "ASP" isn't good enough, just feed the 
output into your sound card.  Memory tuning?  Do the tuning chart in Excel 
or on your Blackberry or handheld.  OK, so you have to turn a knob or 
two....  Another parallel -- I have PC controlled rx's too -- same shade of 
black box, only smaller.  Probably fit inside a RAK or RAL and provide some 
extra shielding from the computer hash. ;-)

There's a web page I came across a year or two ago where some geek gutted a 
RAK and built a PC game-style computer into it.  He liked the way it looked. 
He knew not what an abomination he had committed -- 60 years later, still 
not safe from modders 'n hackers.

Barry