R-808/GRC-14 Military Receiver

This is a vintage Military R-808/GRC-14 general coverage receiver. It is a single conversion superheterodyne receiver covering 2-32 MHz. I believe these were issued to the US Marine Corps in the 1950's.  It's the kind of radio you might see mounted on the back of a jeep in the middle of some jungle or in some command center hooked to a teletype machine.  It was one of my dad's garage sale finds that I picked up for care and feeding. 

I didn't perform any repairs on this radio, but I had a fun challenge trying to figure out how to power it up and listen to it.  Since it was made for military use, there were no labels or standard power plug, just two mysterious looking sockets on the front and a handwritten D-J.  What was the D-J? Perhaps a previous owner's initials?

After some creative Google-ing, I found out that the front power connector (Plug J-1506 ?) has pins for 115V power input on pins D, and J. That explained the mysterious D-J.  I fashioned a plug using some wire connectors.  The radio is apparently also made to work on 28V for ship use on pins A and E.  However, I did not test this.

I searched around some more to determine what to do with the Audio connector. I found that this radio was meant to pair up with a 600 Ohm LS-166 speaker using a "U-77" connector.  I searched around on the connector and found that audio comes out of the radio on pins A and B. For testing, I simply used a small 8 Ohm speaker I had in my junk box. I powered up the radio and was able to listen to some AM stations including WWV at 15.00 MHz.

I opened the radio up to take a look inside.  This radio is very well sealed and amazingly well built. I expect you could use it at the beach while sitting in the sand and surf and still be OK.  It's also, quite heavy.   Here you can see the large circular drums that contain the printed frequency readout.

Notice the bright blue Selenium Rectifier.

 

Apparently, you can't use this radio above 10,000 feet.  I suppose that's good to know if you are carrying it up into the mountains. Insides show that this radio was built by Federal Telephone And Radio Company.

Right Side

Bottom of the radio. I counted 23 tubes total in the entire radio.

Links/References

• Video of a R-808 being used by a Japanese Military Radio Club 
• Antique Radio Forum Posting with informaiton about power plug
• Antique Radio Forum Posting with History and Photo
• Someone's write up in Italian
• Another R-808 page with Pictures.
• Reference to these being used on the M38A-1 (Jeep)