[Boatanchors] RCA 1496 Byrd Antarctic RX

[Wilson Lamb]

It's been a while since I asked...
Does anyone have one, experience with one, or know where one is?
Or any original documentation?
It was the main RX for the 1928 first Antarctic expedition.
OSU has extensive Byrd material, but surprisingly little is technical.  Let me know if you want to talk about this.
I bought one book, The Radio Manual, by Sterling, that has a couple of pages.
These were VERY expensive, in the 20s, and many were used commercially, by airlines, for example, to communicate with planes and among their route stations.
But few survive and I've never seen a single article about them, except in Sterling.
Their secret weapon was the 22 tetrode RF amplifier, which provides considerable gain and isolates the 24 regen detector from outside influences, like frequency shift caused by antenna swinging..
73,
Wilson
W4BOH