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Date: | Sat, 17 May 2014 23:21:15 -0500 |
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Remember the various Motorola draggie-talkies as they
were called in the late sixties and early seventies? I had one
for awhile that I think was a Motorola H23AN but I could be
wrong on the model number as this was about 40 years ago and I
have enjoyed one or two nights of non-non24 sleep since then.
The rig was the size of a lunch box and had clasps on
each end like a lunch box. The transceiver unplugged becoming
the lid and the bottom half contained the batteries. Oh, the
batteries! There were D-cells for the filaments of the tubes,
yes tubes. There was a small square 6-volt battery for the TR
relay and the transistor amplifier for the audio input to the
transmitter. But wait, there's more.
The electrochemical ensemble was topped of with two
67.5-volt B batteries. They were paralleled when in receive
mode and seriesed when in transmit for the final plate voltage.
It ate batteries like candy. The tubes were peanut tubes
with 1.3-volt filaments and 67.5-volt plates except for the
finals and a driver which used 135 volts.
The tubes really were about the size of a whole peanut,
maybe the size of a man's little finger with 5 pins in a line
across the base. The driver and finals were pencil-sized round
glass tubes and the whole transmitter put out a searing one
Watt.
The receiver was excellent although it did not have a
speaker-driver but used a Stromberg-Karlson telephone-type
handset so you had to hold it to your ear to hear the receiver.
You could turn it up nice and loud and set the squelch
and that was all you could adjust.
It was stout but hard to keep the transmitter peaked up
although its frequency was nice and steady. Another guy in our
club had a much better GE draggie-talkie that had a rechargeble
nicad pack and drove a really good-sounding speaker. I was
jealous. It had similar peanut tubes for the RF stages in the
transmitter but the receiver was all solid-state. When he
transmitted, you could hear the whine of a DC-DC converter so
there were no high-voltage batteries to buy every few hours of
operation.
It had a full-sized Motorola carbon mike which hung on
one end of the case. I thought it was cool, back then.
I eventually removed the transmitter board and built a
base power supply. I used it that way for a few years and then
got a more modern rig for the seventies. I did save the tubes to
show people and the big heavy telephone-style handset with a
push-to-talk buttin in the middle.
Martin
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