RadioBanter - View Single Post

December 6th 05, 10:43 PM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

Carter-K8VT wrote:
wrote:

I've never used any of the modern drake stuff, but I
have a lot of the old. IE: 2C receiver, 2CQ speaker/multiplier,
R4 receiver, T4XB transmitter, etc, etc. They are very good
radios overall. In the 60's when they came out, they were
probably 2nd to only collins. And some, but not all,
actually preferred the drake 4 line over the collins S line.

Count me in for "actually preferring the Drake", at least my "4B line"
as opposed to the Collins "S-line".

The collins is probably slightly better, but it ain't by a
whole lot.

Well, it clearly depends on your definition of "better". Possibly the
Collins mechanical filters gave better ultimate selectivity performance,
but they sure fell apart in QRN conditions.

To me, the beauty of the Drake was its flexibility--you could add bands
by just adding crystals, it had provision for crystal controlled
transmit for your favorite net frequency or auto-start RTTY net, you
could easily FSK the transmitter for RTTY and the receivers had
provision for placing a spare audio output jack to feed your RTTY
demodulator. Also, the Drakes were great for CW, while the Collins was
noted mainly as an SSB rig.

Sorry, forgot to mention a couple of other nifty Drake features--the
great pass band tuning that let you do rtty and shift interference out
of the pass band for CW and SSB, and the inclusion of 160 meters. Also,
even though it was not an inexpensive radio, it was waaay more
inexpensive than Collins.