Friday, September 3, 2010

Back to the 70's



Drake TR-33c from the late 70's


Received two NOS Comm Spec Tone boards.  They program to only one tone and you use 'solder blobs' to select the tone that you want.  One went in a FT-726 V/UHF All Mode from the early 80's and the other went into the Drake (actually Kenwood-Trio) TR-33c which was an upgrade to the much more famous TR-22 that was probably the 1st really sucessful transistor FM Transceiver for the Amateur Radio Community.  These units helped fuel  the 'repeater craze' that was a forerunner to modern Cell Phone systems.  Now the radio will make a good Emergency Monitor for the local repeater because it draws very little power it will run for days off a small gel cell battery.  35ma on Rx with no signal.  Rig underneath is the home made 20M CW transceiver called the Willamette20.


Comm-Spec Tone Board


This is similar to the tone boards used but this is a newer model with a DIP switch instead of solder blobs for the tone selection and this one will do 64 tones instead of 32.

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