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Was There Ever A Remco Caravelle Under Your Tree?

I wanted one of those when I was a kid but I had to wait until I learned enough to build an AM transmitter. My first one used a 12AU7 tube as a Hartley oscillator. It worked quite well and sounded great!
 
I had a lot of fun with mine. The receiver was basically a TRF radio, a crystal set with an audio amplifier. It received local stations and powerful adjacent market signals, and even some of the I-A and I-B skywaves that were fairly close or directional toward your RL. The skywave was best after the local stations signed off. If a weak station was too close to a strong one, it was difficult to receive. We had a 500 watt PSA station that was 50 kHz away from a 5000 Day/1000 Night station, and it came in OK when the Class III was on Night power before Sunrise.

They were so worried about the Part 15 rules that it basically wouldn't transmit or receive below 600 kHz or above 1500 kHz. If there were no other closely spaced stations, you could receive stations below 600 or above 1500 by taking the tuning knob to the lower and upper limit, and listening down the selectivity curve.

If you tried to extend the wire to increase the transmitting range, it would actually decrease the range and lower the upper transmitting frequency range.

More details later.
 
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Rush Limbaugh started out on one of those. I wonder how many of those guys would go on later to become...pirates.
 
The "off air monitor" was basically a crystal radio going to the speaker. When in the off and TRANSMIT position, if you had a good location and ground, it would receive strong nearby stations very faintly. This aggravated family members when I was not around to explain it, as it was a radio that despite not being very loud, they couldn't turn off. I figure that the reason my set up worked that way was because the ground wire was connected to a water pipe that went to an outside faucet. It was far from the water meter, and there was probably 50-60 feet of copper pipe once you went around corners.
kf4rca said:
Rush Limbaugh started out on one of those. I wonder how many of those guys would go on later to become...pirates.
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And how many broadcasters were once pirates? I'd guess a fairly high percentage. Owners for sure. Part 15 is a "gateway drug". One had a pirate TV station. One did "remotes" that got out a little too far. One "souped up" the High School Carrier Current station. That's just the three I can think of offhand. They own licensed AMs, FMs, and LPTVs now. Then there's the RNI guy.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
How many of you had a Remco Caravelle? Do you still have it in any condition? For those who don't know, the Remco Caravelle was an AM Receiver/Part 15 Transmitter that first came out circa 1962.

73778e472809e0e614778b5984d31544.jpg
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Never had one of those, but if I remember correctly when I was 5 years old my Dad bought me a crystal radio set that could have been a Remco product, it was in a blue plastic casing. That was in 1960.
 
I did not have one of those either, but I did build an Allied Radio Part 15 transmitter kit. It came with a 10 ft wire which you were suppose to use as an antenna. I went out and bought about 200ft of bell wire and strung it around our house. It allowed me to transmit for about 3 blocks. I broadcast every night playing records and reading the news out of the local newspaper with a teletype sound in the background.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
How many of you had a Remco Caravelle? Do you still have it in any condition? For those who don't know, the Remco Caravelle was an AM Receiver/Part 15 Transmitter that first came out circa 1962.

73778e472809e0e614778b5984d31544.jpg
Click to expand...
I had a Remco product, but it wasn't that one. It was circa 1967-68, and it had a diode detector with a one-transistor audio amplifier that doubled as a PA when a microphone was connected (it did not have an oscillator). I couldn't tell you the model name or number, and the transistor blew out frequently. IIRC, it was a 2N107 which was common in these kits in the early/mid '60s.
 
radioman148 said:
I did not have one of those either, but I did build an Allied Radio Part 15 transmitter kit. It came with a 10 ft wire which you were suppose to use as an antenna. I went out and bought about 200ft of bell wire and strung it around our house. It allowed me to transmit for about 3 blocks. I broadcast every night playing records and reading the news out of the local newspaper with a teletype sound in the background.
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I remember the cobalt-blue Allied transmitters, as well as the Lafayette units of a few years later that were in a larger cabinet.

IIRC, Allied also sold several electronics modules in the 1960s that looked like hockey pucks with wires sticking out of them, including AM and FM Part 15 transmitters.
 
This was the radio under my tree on Christmas morning 1972 that made me a serious DXer.

It was still dark out and soon after I opened it up and put the batteries in, I remember tuning to WKBW Buffalo almost 300 miles away and hearing the song 'You're So Vain' by Carly Simon.

radio.jpg
 
gar hi said:
This was the radio under my tree on Christmas morning 1972 that made me a serious DXer.

It was still dark out and soon after I opened it up and put the batteries in, I remember tuning to WKBW Buffalo almost 300 miles away and hearing the song 'You're So Vain' by Carly Simon.

View attachment 1515
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My first DX radio, too! It was a garage sale find when I was 8 or so... and I discovered I could hear a completely different country on it! (I mean, it was CJBQ 800 from 50 miles across Lake Ontario, but still. I was hooked.)
 
Christmas 1962 found me with a Remco Caravelle under my Christmas tree. I mostly tuned it to 1130 which was clear in those days before WISN moved to the channel two and a half years later. I remember that, as a receiver, performance was substandard, but not horrible.

The next year, Santa brought me a Hallicrafters S-118. I had a lot of fun with that one, too!
 
cyberdad said:
Christmas 1962 found me with a Remco Caravelle under my Christmas tree. I mostly tuned it to 1130 which was clear in those days before WISN moved to the channel two and a half years later. I remember that, as a receiver, performance was substandard, but not horrible.

The next year, Santa brought me a Hallicrafters S-118. I had a lot of fun with that one, too!
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Where did you live then? Did you use the roll of red wire connected to the back terminal, which of course was disconnected when you switched to transmit? In my area, we had several stations across the dial that were in excess of 10 mV/m. It just caused selectivity problems when I used it. I should have tried it during the Sunday and Monday morning silent periods to see how it worked. Could you get WCAR, WDGY, and KWKH on 1130? I remember also that somebody posted here from Poughkeepsie that got WCAR interference during CH to WNEW. It was authorized before Critical Hours rules went into effect, and is about the equivalent IDF toward Poughkeepsie of a 50 kW nondirectional station.
 
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cyberdad said:
Christmas 1962 found me with a Remco Caravelle under my Christmas tree. I mostly tuned it to 1130 which was clear in those days before WISN moved to the channel two and a half years later. I remember that, as a receiver, performance was substandard, but not horrible.

The next year, Santa brought me a Hallicrafters S-118. I had a lot of fun with that one, too!
Click to expand...
I had a used Hallicrafters once, that was too expensive to repair for my budget at the time.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
Where did you live then? Did you use the roll of red wire connected to the back terminal, which of course was disconnected when you switched to transmit? In my area, we had several stations across the dial that were in excess of 10 mV/m. It just caused selectivity problems when I used it. I should have tried it during the Sunday and Monday morning silent periods to see how it worked. Could you get WCAR, WDGY, and KWKH on 1130? I remember also that somebody posted here from Poughkeepsie that got WCAR interference during CH to WNEW. It was authorized before Critical Hours rules went into effect, and is about the equivalent IDF toward Poughkeepsie of a 50 kW nondirectional station.
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I can't speak for cyberdad, but during the day on a good radio I could hear WCAR via groundwave just north of Chicago. KWKH and WDGY were heard during critical hours especially in the late fall-early winter.
 
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