[Milsurplus] TCS used as civilian marine radios, re-posted with HTML removed.

[Hubert Miller]

There was a company up north, i think they were in Bremerton, WA, called 
P.A.R. =  "Pan American Radio" that in the late 1940s and early 1950s
built boat radios. A couple of their models used parts easily 
indentifiable as coming from 'Command Sets'.  One of their models used 
the BC-456
moduator as the dynamotor PS for a radio. I actually a decade ago or 
more met a man at a PSARA antique radio swapmeet who'd as a youngster
worked for P.A.R., which astonished me, that anyone else actually knew 
this name. He's gone now, apparently. He told me the company had
failed due to mismanagement - a common story i have heard, altho i 
suspect it's not always strictly accurate.
When i shopped at "Pacific Surplus" on First Ave. around 1964, they had 
a bunch of unfinished PAR radios there. This was a little set about the
size of a small home AM radio. It had a tunable receiver covering 
something like 1 - 3 MHz, so you got a bonus of part of the AM BC band. 
To
use it, you moved the switch to 'Transmit' and spoke into the speaker on 
the radio. Pretty cheap thing. I actually have one that needs 
restoration.

I found that 'Pacific Fisherman' magazine from these years has a lot of 
interesting ads for boat radios, and some manufacturers and models that
seem to be totally unknown now. Then antique stores where you might find 
these price these too high, however. PAR had ads there too. One
thing that surprised me is that Seattle's own 'Northern Radio' never 
seemed to run any ads.

I did not have any exposure to actual fishing operations or fishing 
fleets in the Seattle area, only to the surplus market, but i never saw 
any
mil-surplus type radios show up from the fishing fleet after Dec. 1976. 
Maybe this was more of a California thing, but i may be wrong about 
that.
I think i read that Seattle is the biggest fishing port on the West 
Coast.  Maybe with PAR, Northern Radio, Intervox, and Northwest 
Instrument

I recall around 1976 a friend and i followed out a lead to the Lake 
Union area, then much more industrial, where some company had an
operation converting Navy ships into fishing fleet processing ships. The 
'stack of TCS's' were nowhere to be found, but there WERE stacks of
RBMs and RBS's and some RAKs and what not. We bought several RBM setups 
and later that day connected the power supplies up and they
played fine - of course!
-Hue Miller
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