ALLIED RADIO

[Stan &/or Pat Muller]

Hi Gang,
   Having grown up on the east coast, I never got closer to Allied than
their catalog, which as we all agree, was something awesome. I do
believe, however, for the ultimate ham / electronics shopping
experience, one has to return to the golden days of surplus, and
remember the stores on Cortland Street in New York City. There wasn't an
internet, back then, and other than what you could find in CQ and 73 And
QST, you were on your own when it came time to convert, your newly found
treasure, as well as, most of the time having to build a power supply
for it, which was preceded by having to follow the wiring and draw your
own schematic for it. Those were truly, the good old days of radio! You
could actually smell the anti fungicide varnish used on the military
equipment when you came out of the subway onto Cortland Street. I
remember one day while I was shopping I asked the store manager what a
particular item was. He said it was $7 and beyond that he didn't know.
It was a hermetically sealed case about 8" by 10" by about 2 feet long,
with a few terminals on each end and no controls. I bought it and left
my phone number, in case he should find out anything about it. When I
got it home, curiosity got the best of me and I opened it up, using tin
snips as a can opener. Wow you should have seen the goodies. it was some
type of continuos loop wire recorder with the record and play back heads
mounted on micrometer adjustments, and lots of miniature tubes. to bring
a long story to an end, two weeks later the guy from the store called me
and said he had a buyer for the voice scrambler and he would split the
$200 the buyer was willing to pay. We both had a bad day when I told him
what I had done to it. $200 was a lot of money in the early fifties.
That was Cortland Street.
73 Stan KB0MHQ

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