[MRCA] Strong Youtube Stomach

[Ray Fantini]

If you look at "repairguy000" YouTube directory you can see his first video where he bought the ARB on EBay for $57 The URL is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks3009Aq4pE 
It is not a pristine example of an ARB with the Ham installed AC power supply, speaker and output transformer. Also it has the connectors missing and a gain control installed on the front. I have said it before and will say it again; the Ham radio history is just as valid as military service history. Especially in the case of something like a ARB where most of us alive today never saw one in military use or unmodified condition. I have seen quite a few all modified by Hams and if it were not for the fact that the ARB were as common as dirt in the late forties and fifties and used as a entry radio into ham radio  few of them would be around today. It was the radio that if you did not have much money you would buy, use some  old junk radio and TV parts to build the AC supply and along with your rock bound 6L6 transmitter that got you on the air. I would propose that most existing ARB receivers have more hours of operation as SWL and Novice receivers then in military service. Couple year's back I built up a BC-348 that was a copy of my first receiver that I used for SWL and later Ham service. This BC-348Q is not the receiver I had back in the seventies as a teenager but what the BC-348Q I had back then should have been, and I regard that example of what the hams of the fifties and sixties used, and what I used in the seventies just as relevant to history as the perfect examples that many collectors have from when it was in military service. Not as an equal monetary value but as equal worth, at least in my opinion. But we are a diverse group and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Here is a link to my ham hack job at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKRez8euQU4 
Ray Fantini KA3EKH