[Milsurplus] ARC-4

[Brenda Gentry]

I spent my youth in a place where CB was more popular in the early 
1960s  than it  was in the 70s. There were dozens of basement and garage 
labs turning out CB "Leeneeeyaars" that varied from brilliant to lethal. 
The brilliant one was not  an amplifier, but an AM transmitter that used 
a CB rig as an exciter. Fair and G&G were the suppliers of the 
components for that one. At the time, 1625 tubes were 19 cents each in 
quantity. Surplus power and modulation transformers, and filter chokes, 
were also not very expensive. Five 1625s were the driver and final, 
modulated by four more 1625s. The modulator tube in the CB transceiver 
drove the modulators in the "amplifier". The  now unmodulated RF output 
was the exciter.  It worked and sounded very good. The lethal version 
used five 25JS6s in parallel with the filaments in series for 120 volt 
power in. The 120 volts went into a quadrupler that gave well over 500 
volts on the plates. A car marker light bulb  (12 volts at about 1 1/4 
amp) in series with the plate supply indicated the plate current, a 
loosely coupled #47 indicated output. Tuned to the maximum by a typical 
CBer the signal was as nasty as one could imagine. These are only the 
surface of many tales of electronic engineering done by people there who 
had learned enough about the craft during WW2 to be very dangerous. In a 
weird sort of way, these creations were also a lot of fun and very 
educational.

    B. Gentry, KA2IVY


On 7/20/25 5:51 PM, Hubert Miller wrote:
> A digression, but i was last night looking at a book on 'CB Linears'. 
> There was a paragraph up front that explained the basics of the "smoke 
> theory of electronics". A diverting  alternative to our usual concerns 
> with electron flow.
> -Hue Miller
>
>
>
> Sent from my Galaxy
>
>
>
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