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

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.)

Jon Teske wrote:
[snip]

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.
[snip]

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

William

(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)

William Warren wrote:

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

I stand corrected: according to http://www.radioing.com/museum/tx4.html,
the Ranger II was made from 1961 to 1965. I didn't know the class D
citizen's band was that old.

William

(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)

On Mar 12, 12:00 am, Jon Teske wrote:
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.)

Thanks Jon and William, Excellent info. I am printing these to go into
a binder with my Ranger.

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:48:31 -0400, William Warren
""w_warren_nonoise\"@comcast(William Warren).net" wrote:

William Warren wrote:

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

I stand corrected: according to http://www.radioing.com/museum/tx4.html,
the Ranger II was made from 1961 to 1965. I didn't know the class D
citizen's band was that old.
The creation of the CB band was at the expense of the old ham 11 meter
band (not that anyone used that band very much. The original Ranger
was able to tune 11 meters and the VFO did have calibrations there.
Eleven meters was eliminanted for ham use in the late 50's.

The Citizen's band WAS that old, I would guess +/- a couple years
around 1960. It was not initially very popular and it was intended for
some low level commercial use...companies dispatching trucks and the
like at the local level. (Remember tube radios were still the rule and
were quite bulky.) It took until the mid-1970's when cheap
transistorized transceivers were introduced for the CB band and were
adopted by over-the-road truckers. I would suspect that some popular
folk idioms such as the then-popular Country-Western song "Convoy" and
a couple of really stinkin' movies with CB featured in them captured
the imagination of ordinary folks and a lot of people who really had
utterly no need for a two way radio could get a CB to put in their car
for about $50 or so. This caused so much bedlam on the band that the
radios were functionally useless in metropolitan areas (I live in the
Washington DC/Baltimore area) and didn't serve much purpose until you
got out on the open road. It did make something of a cult though of CB
and certain folks tried to use CB in more of a ham mode including long
distance comms ("skip talking") and power escalation with (illegal)
high powered amplifiers, many the adaptation of the ten meter portion
of legitimate ham amps. This caused the nearly 30 year prohibition of
the sale of amps capable of working in the CB band which of course
meant any ham amp with ten meters on it. The little I listened to CB
(my carpool mate had one in his car) sort of revealed that the chief
purpose of the CB for most folks was to spot speed traps. "Smokey Bear
is hiding in the bush under the I-95 overpass." My car pool guy took
his out of the car after a couple months. In less populated areas
where interference wasn't so pervasive they did serve some purpose. I
recoiled in horror when my father had one in his car in my small
Wisconsin hometown and took on the personna of "Diamond Don"
Sheesh!!!! "Diamond Don, Diamond Don, got your ears up??" All my
efforts to get my dad into ham radio when I was a teen were shot to
Hell. (I wanted Dad to become a ham with the obvious ulterior motive
of financing my hobby...a 13 year old's allowance didn't go very far
when trying to buy rigs.) When dad died, I inherited his three CB
radios which I promptly donated to Goodwill. The CB boom was long over
by then and even Dad didn't have one in his car anymore. I haven't
bothered to listen up there in years.

Jon W3JT

William

(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)

Jon Teske wrote:
The Citizen's band WAS that old, I would guess +/- a couple years
around 1960. It was not initially very popular and it was intended for
some low level commercial use...companies dispatching trucks and the
like at the local level. (Remember tube radios were still the rule and
were quite bulky.) It took until the mid-1970's when cheap
transistorized transceivers were introduced for the CB band and were
adopted by over-the-road truckers.

Actually CB was quite popular by the late 1960's and there were several
organizations founded to provide assistance to travelers and similar
functions provided by hams.

It was populated by pleasant. well mannered people until the trucker's
strike (1976?) when almost overnight it took on it's current form.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:48:31 -0400, William Warren
""w_warren_nonoise\"@comcast(William Warren).net" wrote:

William Warren wrote:

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

I stand corrected: according to http://www.radioing.com/museum/tx4.html,
the Ranger II was made from 1961 to 1965. I didn't know the class D
citizen's band was that old.

William

(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)

The Citizen Radio Service began in 1947, and the first Class D Citizen
Band licenses were issued on September 11, 1958. Not sure when they
were discontinued.

Dick

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:14:04 +0000 (UTC), (Geoffrey
S. Mendelson) wrote:

Jon Teske wrote:
The Citizen's band WAS that old, I would guess +/- a couple years
around 1960. It was not initially very popular and it was intended for
some low level commercial use...companies dispatching trucks and the
like at the local level. (Remember tube radios were still the rule and
were quite bulky.) It took until the mid-1970's when cheap
transistorized transceivers were introduced for the CB band and were
adopted by over-the-road truckers.

Actually CB was quite popular by the late 1960's and there were several
organizations founded to provide assistance to travelers and similar
functions provided by hams.

It was populated by pleasant. well mannered people until the trucker's
strike (1976?) when almost overnight it took on it's current form.

Interesting...I had forgotten that. The time frame seems about right.
I was aware that there was CB activity in the late 60's and many towns
even had little signs that said a local club was monitoring some
channel (other than 19) to provide help. That probably coincided with
the first all transistor tranceivers which made a CB rig practical and
small enough to mount in a car. But in the mid-70's when it really
took off things were pretty much bedlam. Even DX pile-ups were kids'
play compared to trying to communcate on a CB radio for a while. When
my carpool guy had one, he only made one conversation and that was
with a car that was directly in front of us. I'm not sure how the
legal ramifications of this worked, but our carpool passed over I-95
between Washington DC and Baltimore. The Maryland State Police
Barracks located on that highway had a lady passing out traffic info
to truckers. She clearly had a much higher powered station for she was
clearly readable. She seemed to become semi-legendary and it appeared
that every trucker going up and down the East coast knew her by her
first name. The other think CB was used for during commuting hours was
during the two gasoline supply crisies (1973/4 and 1978) many mobile
CBers were on trying to spot gas stations that had supplies and no
long lines. In the latter crisis, one of the radio station helicopter
spotters flew over the tank farms and noted that all the tanks were
filled to the top...the gas companies had created an artificial
shortage and were hoarding gas to drive the price up. When this news
got out the crisis subsided immediately. I have not trusted the
petroleum companies ever since.

Jon W3JT

Geoff.

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:52:33 -0700, Dick wrote:

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:48:31 -0400, William Warren
""w_warren_nonoise\"@comcast(William Warren).net" wrote:

William Warren wrote:

The Ranger II added Six meters in place of Eleven. It was introduced at
about the same time as the Class D citizen's band, IIRC about 1964. At
the time, Six meter AM was very popular, since technicians had full
privileges on the band, so six meters was a good "mid life kicker" and
the Ranger II was produced for several more years.

I stand corrected: according to http://www.radioing.com/museum/tx4.html,
the Ranger II was made from 1961 to 1965. I didn't know the class D
citizen's band was that old.

William

(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)

The Citizen Radio Service began in 1947, and the first Class D Citizen
Band licenses were issued on September 11, 1958. Not sure when they
were discontinued.

There was some sort of Citizens service throughout the 50's as you
say, but it wasn't on 11 meters, or at least not on what had been the
11 meter ham band. I know there was some sort of licensing. If you
bought a CB rig, it usually came with an FCC form inside to send in
for a license. You were supposed to wait until you got the license and
you were issued a callsign. The callsign took the LLLL#### format. The
callsign scheme was almost universally ignored and most folks
transmitted anyway using personally derived "handles" e.g. "Rubber
Ducky" of the Convoy Song fame. There were even some entrepeneurs who
proclaimed to "register" your handle for a fee, but of course that was
meaningless. Not terribly long thereafter the FCC appeared to give up
and did away with individual licensing. (In theory, There is one
"universal" license issued nationally for the entire CB band. The
samething happened to the pleasure boat VHF marine licenseing. Shortly
after I had gotten an FCC Marine VHF ticket (at a fee) the FCC simply
said that there was one VHF Marine license issued for the country and
as long as you operated within the US and territorial waters you just
had to ID youself by your vessel name. You were supposed to have a
license if you took your boat to Canada or the Caribbean for example.
I suspect this is widely ignored. A marine HF license still is
required though at the individual level according to the marine press
(I don't have one, only the domestic VHF.)

Jon W3JT

Dick