American made vintage radio shootout! (Geek content warning)

[jmowreader]

3. Let me throw another fine American-made receiver into the discussion

Made in Gaithersburg, MD, by intelligence officers for intelligence officers.

Let's go through some of the features of this fine radio, which sold for $40,000 new.

The little CRT on the left side is a tuning aid. You could do other things with it, but its primary function is to display a spike for every active emitter within a certain frequency range of what the -8617 is tuned to.

The -8617 is available in many frequency ranges; the unit that ordered it told W-J what they needed and the company inserted the proper tuning cards.

This is a scanner, and it's got two scanning modes, STEP and SCAN. STEP is like a police scanner - you enter the frequencies you want to listen to and it looks for someone who's talking. In SCAN you plug in two frequencies and the receiver searches continuously between them.

The three buttons between the frequency display and the tuning knob are to set tuning range. Let's say you are listening to someone in the 144MHz ham band and you want to tune down to listen to a radio station at 94MHz. Instead of having to crank the radio through the entire 50MHz between the hams and the radio station you can push the MHz button and only the megahertz part of the display will change. This doesn't sound all that straightforward but it makes life on rack REAL nice.

These OCCASIONALLY show up on eBay. The next time I see one I'm grabbing it quick.