[R-390] Anyone know what our military now uses for receivers, not that R390A, drake, W-Johnson HF1000 are now out of date

[Bob Camp]

Hi

There are a lot of people out there who are making HF radios or who  
did make HF radios. Taking only the military / government end of  
things and starting from the R390A:

The R390 was partially replaced in Navy service by the R1051
The Harris RF550 and Racal 6790 GM replaced some of the R390's and a  
slew of other radios.
The "official" replacement for the R390 was the Harris RF590 and  
590A, they pretty much flushed out the 550's and some of the 6790's.
Some of the 590's got replaced by the RF350K (*very* strange but true).
The RF350's are being replaced by Falcon's.

That is only one of the many family trees out there. It's admittedly  
a bit Harris centric. There is another equally valid route that gets  
you to a bunch of Collins gear like the HF-80 and now all the black  
box radios. It also ignores a bunch of Racal radios.

These days an awful lot of what was once done with R390's is done  
with digital "sample the entire band" radios with no knobs on them at  
all. The claimed advantage is that you can get a lot of information  
all at once. They also are quite a bit better at following stuff like  
spread spectrum HF. There's not a lot of straight analog voice  
communications on military HF anymore.

For straight analog intercept work people like Icom and Racal still  
make specialty radios with knobs on them.

Typical prices on this stuff start at $10K and go on up from there.  
The black box systems can easily get you to a major chunk of a  
million dollars. That's not as crazy as it sounds. A R390 would cost  
quite a bit if you translated the original $2K cost into inflation  
adjusted current dollars ....

     Take Care!

             Bob Camp
             KB8TQ


On May 9, 2005, at 2:31 PM, Jack Sullivan wrote:

> Don't know how appropriate this is for a question on
> this site, but I would like to know what our
> military/government now uses, with the R390, the Drake
> R8B, the W.Johnson HF-1000 almost a thing of the past?
>
>
>
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