[R-390] WTD - AN/URM-25

[DJED1 at aol.com]

I see them sometimes at flea markets, but you take your chances on whether  
they work or not.  I haven't priced them, because I already have a Fair  unit I 
bought for $175.  However, I took a look at it a year ago and  wondered why I 
was struggling with a 50 year old piece of test equipment that  was hard to 
set to frequency and drifted quite a bit.  So I did a little  searching on eBay 
and bought a HP8660A for $300.  Wow- what a difference in  functionality.  I 
got it with a .01 to 110 MHz plug-in.  So now I can  use the thumbwheel switch 
to set the frequency to the nearest 1 Hz, and know it  will stay there.  And, 
of course, its got a nice HP attenuator to set the  signal level down to .01 
microvolts.  It makes it easy to check the PTO-  just dial up the frequency in 
25.000 KHz steps and see what the dial reads. 
There are a couple of drawbacks:  it's heavy, so it costs a lot to  ship, and 
it's a lot more complicated to maintain if something breaks.  
But, if you want to be authentic to the '50s era, then the URM-25 is the  way 
to go.
Ed



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