This is the most famous radio ever made

Why?

It's a 'gated' radio. :D

:shrug:

I tripped out when I learned this fun fact about this manufacturer's radios: The dress code for the assembly line workers (all of whom were women) called for nice dresses and heels, out of respect for the work these receivers were to do.

Not so fun for the workers forced to work an assembly line shift in freaking heels...

For the entire lifespan of the company pre-BAE Systems (it started out as Communications-Electronics Inc., then became the CEI Division of Watkins-Johnson Inc.) each device--they made many kinds--was built by one person. You sat in a good chair when you did it, someone brought you a cart full of components, and you built the device yourself. Wearing heels all day wouldn't tear you up.

lots of your posts seeth with blame for men. On another post you made the claim that ex's wife's never murder their husband's with no proof.

Unless they were sitting, working an 8 hour shift in heels would be painful. Have you ever worn them?

But I am glad to know that there are folks here ready to jump at the slightest suggestion at an attack on all men, everywhere. Thanks for holding up your end!

I worked on the Watkins-Johnson assembly line when I lived in Maryland. It was in the years just prior to the Watergate break-in. I may have worked on that actual device.

No shit! We built really good stuff. :smoke:

Your stuff didn't wear out, so we still used it. Why the hell not? There are LOTS of things you can do with a good-sounding, sensitive receiver, and old WJs are definitely that. I want one for personal use.

I have a refrigerator
built in the 50's that still works fine.

Seriously, where did you hear that? I worked for Watkins-Johnson in the early 70's. There were a lot of women on the line, but I had a lot of male co-workers as well. I don't remember any particular dress code other than the protective gear worn in the clean rooms that were used for some assembly.

Turns out it wasn't official, but everyone did it, and it was done before the WJ purchase of CEI.

I remember years after Watergate when I found out that it was a W-J receiver, and I thought "Holy Shit!, I may have worked on that thing."

I did mostly front panel assembly at Watkins-Johnson. Had a NASA soldering certification. I went on to work at the Goddard Space flight Center for various contractors, then started building stage sound and lighting systems, and wound up out on road tours with most of my favorite bands. Damn, those were fun years! :smoke:

(I wish I had thought of that...)

:hi:

What I did, I cannot say.
I was with the ASA.

(XYZ in Viet Nam)

it was still part of Ethiopia. We did more than copy dits.


85 ft dish




150 ft dish



Driving down or riding a bicycle down this road was a real gas

Luigi's Piza? (strip mall outside the gate.)

Cloverleaf Pizza? (across from Feltus Pontiac)

Mohawk Club? (Shirley)

Honest Francis, the Poor Man's Friend? (used cars)

All 50s-60s and long gone.

When I went to BNCOC at Devens, I did a stint as Charge of Quarters in one of the trainee barracks--where I accidentally got in a Boot Polishing Contest with a whole slew of trainees. Anyway, while we were polishing I started singing the classic 05G cadence, "Hey there Billy Boy where ya been / Down at the Mohawk drinkin' gin / Whatcha gonna do when you get back? / Puke it all up and go right back." These poor souls looked at me real weird--first, they don't sing songs about drinking in AIT anymore, and second, the Mohawk closed a long time ago.

And then there was WAAF...now it's in Boston, but it used to be in the Cocaine Realty Building in Worcester. And I'm like naaaaaah...turns out there's a Cocaine family in Worcester, and they're in the real estate business. (Go to opensecrets.org and search for Cocaine...Mary Cocaine gave $250 to Niki Tsongas in 2008.

Oh yes...remember Parthenon Pizza?

I know a niece of Stanley's (Mohawk owner) and if I remember correctly,
he passed away afew years ago.
Cloverleaf Pizza was owned by a relative of mine.
The lineup of used cars at Feltus Pontiac each had keys in the ashtray.
Us kids would fire them up, listen to the radio and eat pizza.
Imagine that today, every car would be gone before sunrise!
Luigi was a Golden Gloves fighter.
I saw a Mercedes 300SL Gull Wing Coup at the Millstream Bar.
The good old days!

I was stationed at a small NATO base in Turkey in the early 60s and that's the radio we used to listen to the news. Am I old or what?

509th Radio Research Group ->313th ->Other

224 Avn Bn, 1st Radio Research Company (AVN) at Cam Ranh Bay

I met some of the newer INSCOM guys, they weren't the same as the men of the lightning fast chicken fuckers.





When Michela Wrong did a book on Eritrea, she did a chapter on us. She included one image: the one of the bridge. I know all the guys on the bridge, but don't recognize them from that angle.

I remember the running cadence the 33's used to sing at Fort Devens...

R-390 sittin' on the bench
Thirty-three sierra with an itty-bitty wrench
Kick it, bang it, shove it on the floor
R-390 comes back for more.

I used to know this ancient master sergeant who was hacking dits when the Army still used that receiver. When they removed it from service and sent them to DRMO, he bought six of them. Then he went to JAG and had them put in his will that he was to be buried in an R-390--he wanted them to cremate him, put his ashes in an R-390 then bury the receiver. He was only about 900 years old when I knew him, so I would assume they did it by now.

The problem with the R-390 in this case, is an R-390 never tried to take down the Republican Party.

would love to have one of the suitcase receivers.
Especially the one with the built in o-scope.

This was supposed to be a hell of a receiver...



Tuning it would have been really weird, though, because it has four tuning knobs--for 10 MHz, 1MHz, 100KHz and 10KHz increments. Their radios were mostly for shipboard use in the radio room, so apparently there's a good reason for the way the radio's designed.

When fine-tuning with the 10KHz knob in heavy seas a jolt wouldn't knock the gross tuning off, like sometimes happens with single-knob tuning. Or, when sailing after a port-call binge Sparky's shaky hand could set the gross tuning knobs and concentrate on the 10KHZ tuning (like the anecdote in "Perfect Storm" about the captain who served only sandwiches for the first two days at sea because his hungover crews' hands were too shaky to hold a fork or spoon).



The ICOM 756PRO-II in my all-Icom radio shack (ca. 2005)

Does that show transmitted spectrum, a panoramic display of the received spectrum, or both?

The glorious Watkins-Johnson 8617. IIRC it is the first receiver the electronics industry ever made that didn't mechanically couple the tuning knob to anything. It's hooked to a plastic disc with printed lines on it, and there are two optical sensors to detect its motion--somehow or another it could figure out whether you were turning it clockwise or counterclockwise so it searched in the right direction.

This...



is the receiver I humped for two years at Fort Campbell. Someone put a lot of forethought into the ergonomics of this receiver. The knobs are all different shapes so you can adjust the radio by feel. There are two other boxes that go with it to turn it into a direction finder--those we did not have at Ft. Campbell, but we had them at Ft. Drum. The receiver weighs 40 pounds with no batteries, so hauling it around on your back is a definite workout. The slickest part of this receiver was it used the same batteries as the old PRC-77 infantry radio, so there was no bitching from supported unit commanders and supply sergeants about those MI pussies needing special things just for them--you just called up for some "prick-77" batteries and C-rats, and they figured you were some lieutenant's RTO. Some really fucking talkative lieutenant's RTO, because the WJ-8640 went through batteries about twice as fast as a PRC-77 did.

if you showed it to 500 average americans, how many would recognize what it is, or even know that a radio transceiver was used in the watergate break-in...? i'm guessing that it would be less than 1%.