----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron" <wd8...@yahoo.com>
To: <k4...@mindspring.com>; <drakelist@zerobeat.net>; "john"
<joh...@nc.rr.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2011 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Drakelist] Collins and Drake Compared
I came into this as computers were making a mark on the
electronic industry and taking away the appeal of ham radio
so I may have this a little wrong.
I recall being told that Collins radio equipment was
manufactured for the government at a time when money was
flowing easy. Drake on the other hand did manufacture items
for the government, but their radios were primarily for the
ham radio consumer market.
If true, then John's statements ring very clearly.
Was I told wrong?
73,
Ron WD8SBB
I am not sure what Drake manufactured beside the ham
radio stuff but they did make some commercial radio gear.
Collins began as a garage shop run by Art Collins. During
the depression he began by selling custom built radio
tranmitters to the wealthier hams, and there _were_ wealthy
people even during the depression. Collins always built his
stuff to a very high level of perfection and finish. It was
sold as much for prestigue as for performance. At some point
he began to build equipment for the airlines and
broadcasting, all of very high quality. At some point he
developed the "Autotune" system, an automated method of
tuning transmitters to a given frequency by means of pre-set
servo motors. This system became very popular among the
airline users since they needed to have frequency agile
circuits. From that it was a natural transision to military
equipment especially stuff for aircraft. The famous ART-13
is an example of an Autotune transmitter made for aircraft
use. As others found government contracts could be
enormously profitable. For one thing they were reliable, the
bills would be payed, and they could be quite large. Once
the defense industry got going, shortly before WW-2, there
was an enormous expansion of industries catering to it. A
number of businesses were created especially to deliver on
government contracts (Northrup Aviation is an example).
Collins did very well at this. Unlike some others (like
Hallicrafters) Collins contract operations continued after
the war. He supplied equipment thought vital to maintaining
a defense effort and the company made sure to apply
innovative design to insure a continuing market. Despite
this Art Collins never forgot the ham market that had given
him his start, but always filled exactly the same role as
when beginning in business; deluxe, state of the art,
equipment for those who could afford it. The first Collins
ham products after the war featured the new idea of a
permeability tuned VFO plus a different method of generating
the final working frequencies that allowed an enmormous
improvement in stability and dial accuracy over anything
else ever offered. Three of these new products were the 75A
receiver, the 32V transmitter and the super-deluxe 500 watt
30K-1 transmitter. None of these had any real competition as
regards its performance. Hallicrafters was still offering a
post-war version of the HT-4, AKA BC-610, at more than
$1500. In 1946 this was probably equivalent to $30,000 now.
Of course surplus BC-610's were soon available at a fraction
of this cost. The 30K was of a similar order of cost but
covered all ham bands and had a very stable VFO plus many
other features. It was entirely up to date, used late Eimac
tubes, and was just a superior machine, if one could afford
it.
The 75A receivers was the key however, this was a
double conversion receiver using the collins permeability
tuned VFO, crystal controled first conversion and the now
familiar method of tuning with out actual bandswitching. It
had a good, low noise front end, and an excellent crystal
filter, evidently licensed by Hammarlund. It was ham band
only, somewhat unusual at the time. It offered the same sort
of performance in terms of stability, noise, and low
spurious responses at 10 meters that other receivers could
offer only up to about 20 meters and many not there. It was
just revolutionary. Other receiver makers quickly began to
develop double conversion sets but most of them were based
on the conventional tunable first LO and fixed second LO so
that stability was as much a problem as with conventional
single conversion sets. I think all had problems so that it
was a few years before any competition came out. In the mean
time Collins kept improving both the receivers and
transmitters and quickly picked up on the trend to SSB,
which the other big manufacturers did not. However, Collins
was always priced right at the top so could be only dreamed
of by most hams. That opened a window of opportunity for
smaller manufacturers to fill the gap. Drake was one of the
more successful of those although Hallicrafters eventually
began to make some respectible equipment. However, I think
Hallicrafters was always too "consumer" oriented to make
really refined stuff and Drake was as refined as Collins was
but with a somewhat different set of compromises, namely
being affordable and having more than SSB cabability. While
the Collins Gold Dust Twins (75A-4 and KWS-1) are capable of
good CW performance CW became pretty much an afterthought
for the S line. It could do it but, at least at first, not
very well. The S-line featured some very new circuit
designs, such as the use of triode mixers to reduce noise
level. Triode mixers had been known from the beginning of
the superhetrodyne but were supplanted by multi-grid tubes
because of the latter's much better isolation of the
oscillator circuit. However, Collins approach was different
than the old one so they were able to get the benifit of low
noise mixing while maintaining stability and isolation. This
sort of approach kept Collins near the top fo the field but
Drake and others were able to adopt advanced circuit design
for much lower priced equipment so had the benifit of better
affordability. Drake seems to have been able to do this
without compromising overall quality, a problem I think
Hallicrafters had.
I add only that I think the smaller size of Drake
probably gave it some flexibility the larger makers did not
have. Large size is not always a good thing in a business.
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickb...@ix.netcom.com
There is more but
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