[Milsurplus] SRR-11/12/13

[Mike Morrow]

William wrote:

>You can not blame too harshly about that - the receivers were not
>designed with 50 year life spans. When they were produced, I bet the split
>section metal casting were just fine.

I got my AN/SRR-13A in 1970 through Navy MARS, when Eighth Naval District MARS literally had a ton of SRR-13, 13A, and FRR-23 receivers for issue.  I still fire it up once in a blue moon or less.  I've never had any mechanical problems with it.  The only electrical problem I ever had was the need to replace a couple of sub-mini tubes.  That last repair was 33 years ago, when the receiver was still officially USN property (MARS accountability had not been dropped yet).  Because of that, I was able to get the tubes issued to me from stock at a nearby Air Force Base.  All of the tubes are indirectly-heated cathode types, and are today available dirt cheap on the internet.  My favorite is the 5902 audio output tube, which is rated at more than 4 watts plate dissipation.

My AN/SRR-13A was, I think, one of the very last ones made.  It had all the official mods, like the replacement of the power supply rectifier tube and signal diode tubes with solid state equivalents.  There's a date stamp of 1961 on one side.  If that is when it was made, it didn't stay in service very long before I got it.  For more than 15 years it was the only full-coverage shortwave receiver I owned, and it did a fine job copying sideband.  I carted it around with me from duty station to duty station when I was in the service and never had a failure of any sort.

I always thought that the frequency projection display was a bizarre design feature.  Heaven help you if you broke the glass frequency scale.

Mike / KK5F