Ray, it rocks me that you say the R-390 is easier to maintain than the SRR-13. I looked at the coil rack with all the moving coil

slugs and thought, what a damn nightmare ! I suppose i’ll get a little taste of that when i open up my ARR-41. Then i’ll have to

decide whether to keep it or not.

A couple R-390 short short stories. Around 1973 i inquired to Slep Electronics about the R-390A offered. This was the papermail

era, of course. Slep wrote back that one way to minimize mtce on the R-390 was to do something to elevate the bottom so it

could breathe. Like put a couple of 2x4 sections below it to raise it off the table. I have never heard that from any other source

and i have no idea on its merits. I didn’t buy the R-390, instead i bought 2 ARR-41 for $90 each. At the time i had no troubleshooting

ability and when they did not work, no surprise now when i think about it, i sold them for about half what i paid. Live and learn. This was the same era when G&G was in its last months. I did buy things from G&G, brand new WWII surplus.

Another time, this must have been in the late 1980s, i was out for a walk around my friend Greg Schilling’s neighborhood in South

Everett WA. We saw a “Yard Sale” sign and dropped in. The fellow had a R-390 for sale, among other things, but i passed on that,

too heavy, big and complicated. BUT it turned out he had worked for Carver and had schematics and such for the Carver car

radio, i think TX-7 and TX-9. This was the car radio built by Eton, Germany, a company which usually knows better. The cassette

player in the radio was badly designed and in most, jammed, and every radio was recalled. ( They were a decade later offered

for sale at Vetco, Bellevue. ) I bought a packet of schematics and such for the car radio and the fellow told me surreptitiously

“Now don’t let anyone know where you got this”. As if it matters.

My father worked at a US Army radio receiving site in Lynnwood, WA, where Edmonds Community College now is.  You can tell

the community is prosperous by this school’s luxuriant architecture; this is not some repurposed buildings deal. My father said

there was a wall of R-390A receivers, which were all tuned to Pacific and Alaska frequencies from the numerous rhombics.

I was never able to see the radio room; we could sometimes get in to pick berries on the grounds, but to visit the inside buildings

took a security clearance. That would have been a DXers dream for me, to be able to tune one of the R-390s with its rhombic

antenna to the low powered New Guinea broadcaster frequencies.

-Hue Miller