[MRCA] Communications Associates, Inc. Radios

[Robert Nickels]

On 6/16/2022 4:32 PM, mstangelo at comcast.net wrote:
> Does anyone have any information or documentation on Communications Associates, Inc. (CAI) radios such as the CA-35 transceiver? They were manufactured at Huntington Station, NY.  One of my Elmers worked there and showed me a radio.

I've looked for information about CAI and haven't found much - but as 
the article you referenced suggests, the marine radio market was perhaps 
their strongest focus area.    I have a couple of the CAI-125 marine SSB 
radios and have converted them for amateur use, as described here:

https://tinyurl.com/yznvuak3

The design is interesting, some unanswered questions always remain when 
reverse-engineering a piece of equipment like this without schematics or 
documentation, but it was fairly simple to get going.   This was a 
crystal controlled radio and I've found nothing to suggest a synthesized 
version  was ever made, but my conversion remedied that.   Construction 
and component quality is good an they clearly put some emphasis on 
styling - they also spend some money on marketing as can be seen from 
the ads they ran.    However marine SSB was a crowded field and as 
reliance on HF diminished the smaller companies like CAI were the first 
to go.   If anyone has more information about CAI I'd like to add it to 
my website.

73, Bob W9RAN