On 11 Mar 2007 20:07:34 -0700, "wb5kcm" wrote:

My Johnson Ranger 1 type 240-616 is serial number is 69352. Would
anyone know the date of manufacture of this model? Any other info that
you may know will be appreciated. Thanks, Randy, WB5KCM

I can't pinpoint a particular serial number to a particular year, but
anecdotally I can tell you that I first saw a Ranger I in the fall of
1955 at the home of one of my early ham mentors during the time
between taking my Novice test and the actually issuance of my license
in January 1956. (The FCC took about 3-4 months back then to get a
ticket to you after you took the test.) I think it was introduced
about 1954 or early 1955. I was a 13 year old 8th grader at that
time. I built my own Ranger I from a kit in the summer of 1959 just
before my Senior year in high school, but didn't get to use it much
because I went away to college the next year, and spent 5 years in
apartments after college. I used it on CW quite a bit in the late
1960's when I bought my first house, but by that time AM phone was
pretty much obsolete. As I was away at college at the time I can't
tell you when the Ranger I was supplanted by the Ranger II but I would
guess the early 1960's. What I can tell you is that the Ranger kit was
about $279.00 in 1959 (and about $249 when introduced) and the wired
and tested version was about $100 more. When you consider that rigs
back then required separate receivers and transmitters and a complete
station (I had a Hammarlund HQ-100) would run about $500, you can see
that modern transceivers in the $700-1500 range are actually quite a
bargain when inflation is factored in. When I bought my Ranger, I was
making $.90 an hour in my part-time after-school job at the public
library in my Wisconsin hometown. I paid for the transmitter when my
folks arranged a loan for me from my insurance policy. My folks bought
the receiver as a Christmas present. Between my initial licensing and
the building of the Ranger, I used, in turn, a Heath AT-1, a Johnson
Adventurer and a Globe Scout 680A, the first two bought used and the
latter built from a kit from the proceeds of my very first
job...teaching Morse Code as a Boy Scout camp staff member.
The transmitter was just known at the Viking Ranger and the
designation "Ranger I" was an informal one given to the rig after the
Ranger II (which is what Johnson called it) was introduced. Aside from
cosmetics and the paint job and the elimination of 11 meter coverage
when 11 meters became the CB band, I don't think there was much
functional difference between a Ranger I and a Ranger II. There may
have been some circuit changes but I don't know what they might have
been. If there were any evolutionary changes during the production
run of the Ranger I, they must have been subtle because I don't
remember any Johnson ads mentioning it.

My Ranger worked quite well when I finally got to use it. The fatal
downfall of my rig though was when a temperature compensating
capacitor failed in the VFO section and the rig started to drift all
over the place. The original component was no longer available
seemingly anywhere and I must have tried 50 other NPO capacitors of
varying values to try to correct that drift. I never did get it fixed
and finally bought my first SSB transceiver, a Drake TR-4.

I sold the rig in the early 1970's.

Jon Teske, W3JT (I was K9CAH and later W3DRV in those days.)