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Reviews For: Collins designed R-390A

Category: Receivers: non-amateur adaptable for ham use

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Review Summary For : Collins designed R-390A
Reviews: 26MSRP: 300-600 used
Description:
Military type receiver with .540 to 30 mHz receive. More a AM/CW based receiver which performs well on SSB while reducing RF gain control. Extremely heavy, electron tube based design. Collins designed with different manufacturers.
Product is not in production
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# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00264.8
KL7KN Rating: 2002-03-26
Military heavy weight Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I spent a lot of years in military radio maintenance - not playing (operating) the rig, fixing them. The R390 is a nice rig but has more gears than a Ford tranmission! Tuning the bands is a pain due to the mech "digital" dial.
For monitoring a fixed service, good stuff, for SWL, pretty marginal.
It's granddad, the R388/URR (Collins 51J4) much better choice and much easier to work on. Rebuilt several while in Korea (1976) and they still (last I heard)are chug'n along - very stable and sensitive with great filters.
Yes, I have 3 R390s (in storage) and have had them in daily use - for MARS work. Good rig, much better is out there from a maintenance standpoint.
K4AQU Rating: 2002-03-21
Test equipment Time Owned: more than 12 months.
This receiver is the best comm eqpt that has been in use. Have operated and maintained it in the military for several years.Also used it Down Range and at the Cape Radio Receiver Site.

I have a good cond unit on my work bench which I used it for trouble shooting HF equipment during repair.

IT can be used for many test type devices Field strength meter; rf det.;audio input db meter; and the crystal osc. has many output freq. that can be used for injection perposes. I used it to check out some coaxial traps I designed by injectiog rf from my test transceiver.The carr meter is very accurate in db so great for mon. test ant. when your tuning a antenna like a beam or quad.

There are many other uses but when used with the outboard solidstate crystal prodect detecor it has a great ssb sound not to say the least about the internal mech filters.

Thats it I guess I should give it a 5 but 5 would be a perfact score and I don't have any thing else to compare it with.
K8KAV Rating: 2002-03-19
Cold War Warrior Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
The Collins R-390 is legendary. Having used it and abused it when I was a radio intercept op in England during the Cold War years, I can vouch for its excellent reliability, durability and accuracy. I learned quite quickly that I could drop four megs on the hand crank and spin that kc dial and find a target that QSY'ed without my permission in a matter of seconds. With the proper antenna system the R-390 was a major asset in the electronic communications for the USAF Security Service. A weapon of extreme value to the United States in keeping watch on our enemies. Once in a while the civillians would develop a piece of equipment for the military that actually worked quite well. The Collins R-390 was one of those. Never met a GI who was in radio intercept who didn't love to have one in his rack.
I actually had a model in my home for two months prior to it shipment to England to be placed in the Americans at Chicksands Museum located in Bedfordshire England. We used to refer to it as the Marilyn Monroe of HF receivers. Beautiful, smooth to the touch, with great knobs! Keep your bells and whistles digital stuff in use today. I'll take a R-390 any time. Give me a typewriter an antenna and some headsets and I'm in heaven.
God Bless the Collins Co. for developing this piece of equipment. Like I said, it was a great weapon for us in keeping surveilance upon our enemies.
W4MGY Rating: 2001-07-01
Still The Best Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Over the past 35+ years as a SWL and ham, I have owned many receivers, both American and forign made. Of all of them, none have been as satisfying to own and operate as a Collins R-390A. I must agree with the posirive comments in the reviews on the '390A.

Granted, the '390 is not a digital keypad entry 1000 memory radio festooned with all kinds of bells and whistles. It is big and ugly, looks like it came out of a battleship, and has serious radio business writen all over it. Yes, it was designed to monitor a specific frequency, and the tuning mechanism can be a chore to use. But when properly cared for, equipped with good tubes, and aligned properly; If you can't hear it on a '390A, you ain't going to hear it any other radio period.

Although the R-390A was a military receiver; it is probably the best example of the highest quality technology that could be built during the vacuum tube era. It is because of the build out quality that went into the manufacture of these sets why so many of them are still operating today. The R-390A will never be obsolete. With the addition of outboard adapters for SSB, or someday digitial signal detectors; this classic will still be performing long after most of us are gone.

Having said this, personally speaking I feel that all comtemporary amateur radio HF receivers (and transceivers) fall short of what can be achieved with classic radio technology. Every forign made receiver I have ever owned has been a sore disappointment when compared to an R-390. If you have the room and the desire to own one; now is the time to buy the Stradiverius of American radios. Own one and you'll understand why the R-390A was probably the best receiver ever made.
AI2Q Rating: 2001-06-30
...and R-390 too Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I'll second N8FVJ's remarks. I also own the predecessor R-390 ( a Collins receiver), as well as the R-392 variant (mine is a Stewart-Warner). All of these receivers are remarkable examples of American engineering at its best.

My R-390 non-A was smoke damaged in a house fire (WA2FZW's house burned to the ground) and was then stored in his shed outdoors (more or less) for twenty years. When I got it I opened up the heavily blackened set, and removed mouse droppings, a mouse skeleton, and gobs of straw and other detritus. Disgusting. The front-panel markings were impossible to read.

After washing it down with a garden hose, I totally disassembled it, cleaning all the modules and geartrain with a toothbrush and Simple Green cleaner.

I even opened up each and every IF can and RF-deck can (they're removable, using miniature silver-plated banana plugs) and cleaned out the spider webs and other droppings. Inspection with a magnifying glass revealed that the coil doping was so high quality that there was no damage--not even a strand of fine wire was out of place on the coils (good Q).

I also used a drop of Stabilant-22 conductive polymer on all the mini-banana plugs and jacks as I reinstalled the cans and powdered iron slugs.

All the tubes and front-panel lamps tested 100-percent good too. So, I reassembled it, cleaned and oiled the exquisite mechanical linkages, put De-Oxit on all the set's switch contacts, synchronized the mechanical subsystem, cleaned all the connectors and wiring harnesses, and electrically aligned all three IFs and the RF front-end.

The old R-390 now plays like a champ! The only defective component was an open 1-Mohm resistor in the set's xtal calibrator.

In some ways, the R-390 is superior to the R-390A (mine is an early one made by Motorola) with its mechanical filters. Because the R-390 non-A uses no mechanical filters in the 455 kc IF strip, there's no group delay (phase shifting). As such the recovered audio on AM SW is superb.

By the way, I use a xtal-controlled BFO, and outboard product detector with its own AGC generator for SSB reception on the Motorola R-390A. That makes it a really nice receiver for SSB. You can see my schematic for this at http://www.borg.com/~ohern/R390A/ or http://pdq.com/boatanchors/ssb/.

My R-392 uses JFETs inside old glass tubes for both 1st and 2nd mixers. If anyone's interested, I can describe how I did this.

GL with your R-390, whether it's an A version, or even an R-392. I think you'll find that there's nothing that cannot be heard on these sets. My R-390 Series receivers always hear equally as well or better than my Omni-V or Drake TR7A receivers. The R-390 receivers are also exceptionally stable and offer a highly linear mechanical digital readout of frequency.

Vy 73, AI2Q, Alex in Kennebunk, Maine
JAMES_BENEDICT_EX_N8FVJ Rating: 2001-06-30
Extreme Performance Time Owned: more than 12 months.
This very heavy receiver is unbeatable for sensitivity, selectivity, close-in IMD Blocking and 100kHz Blocking as well. First, a multi-tracking slug tune preselector gets rid of IMD and Blocking issues. The mechanical filters set the selectivity with 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1 kHz bandpass. Next, an audio filter for CW is so selective it sounds like a DSP without all the garbled audio. The mechanical digital readout is accurate to at lease 1 kHz, thus finding stations is not any problem. Per Sherwood Engineering measurements, nothing has outperformed this receiver yet on the amateur market. The only problem is the 80+ lbs and tubes which may fail every 10 to 30 years. I believe this receiver will go up in value as well.