[Premium-Rx] Racal RA6778 firmware listing needed, and eprom longevity...

[Dan Rae]

I recently bought one of these interesting receivers, which 
incidentally, must qualify as one of the earliest, if not the earliest 
Premium Rx, (Vintage late 1978) only to discover that it has lost one of 
the firmware eprom contents, and is thus totally dead, in other words an 
ex-radio.

I was aware that eproms could theoretically lose their contents with 
time, but this is the first time I've seen it at first hand.  I heard 
that the early manufacturers of eproms only guaranteed them to retain 
data for ten years.  In this case 25 plus years seems to have been 
enough to do it.  The first of the three 2708 eproms in the radio shows 
all Fs...

So, I'm going to embark on a project to back up the contents of all the 
eproms around here, in the older gear first, and there are a lot!  9 in 
the hp 8903A, more in the 3586 and who knows what else until I start 
looking? 

Meanwhile is there anyone who has a working one of these RA6778s , and 
it must be the A or B model, not the later C, who can help?  I have 
eproms and a programmer, I just need the file to stuff in there.

And beware! Yours may be the next to die...

73
Dan
ac6ao / g3ncr