[Premium-Rx] USSR R155P receiver

[Michael O'Beirne]

Good evening all,

I have had a look at this receiver on the Helmut Singer website.  Here are a few thoughts:-

1.       This receiver reminds me of a transistorised version of the old valved monster TMC naval receivers such as the AN/FRR-74 (DDR-5K).  It even has the same Nixie tube display.

2.    There is a big centrally placed drawer with 6 Nixie tubes and a number of what must be decade switches below them.  This is clearly the synthesiser module.  This set is therefore click-click-click tuned by the decade switches to 100Hz increments plus almost certainly a fine tune over the 100Hz increments to "fill in the gap" between tuning steps.  This is OK for tuning to predesignated channels but is completely useless for monitoring and general tuning up and down.  The description of it as a "surveillance receiver" in the Helmut Singer catalogue is nonsense.  Thise type of receiver was generally used for point-to-point links either on land or at sea.  Monitoring receivers have a free tune control such as you find with the RA1772 and RA6790.

3.    I expect the front end has a valve or two, loads of old-fashioned tuned circuits and is probably pretty bomb proof.  Russians retained valves in their front ends for far longer than we did because of the vastly superior survivability of valves to the dreaded EMP.  My guess is that the front end drawer is directly below the synthesiser drawer which has the Nixie display, and the PSU drawer will be on the very top.  You can see a monitoring meter top left with what looks like "go" and "no go" meter markings and what appear to be 16 fuse holders and a big heatsink.  The Russians very sensibly put the PSU at the top (rather than the bottom as we do) because the PSU is usually the hottest part and needs to be on top to avoid heating up all the other modules.

4.    Each of the three lower drawers (each with a meter on the LHS) is probably devoted to a specific mode such as RTTY, NBFM and ISB.  You find this on many Western point-to-point receivers by TMC, R&S, Marconi, Plessey and Racal.

5.    I bet it is extremely solid and well made.  The weight at 100kg is not all that much for a radio well over 40 inches high.  If Marconi had made it you could easily add 50kg to the overall weight!!
I once had in the shack a lovely Russian maritime receiver, the Volna K.  ("Volna" means a wave). It was from about 1965 - 1970, valved but very solid and nice to use and with parts of excellent quality, built regardless of cost.  The tuning system was a direct copy from a German WW2 design of |Telefunken, the Koln E52, using some precision optics to magnify a superbly engraved very fine glass scale by projecting a light beam through the glass scale to the rear of the chassis where it hit a mirror and was reflected back to a ground glass screen on the front panel.  It was possible to tune directly to 5kHz or better at 22MHz. The very heavy tuning knob was a straight copy of that on the Marconi Atalanta marine receiver.  In fact most Russian radios are derivatives of Western kit, but adapted intelligently for their own manufacturing processes.  In general Russian electronice are well built and robust (excluding some of their crummy domestic stuff) and relatively easy to use.

6.    The price with German VAT is 2146 Euro which is rather steep for an unknown radio and in unknown condition, albeit with a mass of manuals but all in Russian.  I'd love to have it but I am fast running out of room here and it's too expensive (particularly as we in UK have to pay import duty on top of our VAT and transport costs).  

7.    If any PR member does buy it, could he please contact me directly because I'd love to write an article on it for the UK's Radio Bygones or Short Wave Magazine, and full acknowledgements of course for the help.  I'll also prepare a precis for the PR data base.  This stuff in reasonable condition is so scarce that readers would be delighted for a few pics and a general description.  There is some chance that one of their older readers may have encountered the set on his travels in East Germany.  RB have just published my article on the very rare and beautifully made NEMA encyphering machine designed by the Swiss in WW2 to replace their old Enigma-type machines.  A real "Rolex" job.  

73s to all
Michael O'Beirne
G8MOB

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