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Pic Of The Day / Unimatrics Stingray 11, 23ch "Marine" Grade CB - FB Marketplace
- Thread starter Wire Weasel
- Start date
Unimetrics sold a lot of Marine oriented CB's back in the day, but I don't think I have ever seen one with SSB before, that is rare for a marine CB. Unimetrics also made a number of matching CB and VHF radios with the same color schemes and shape. My favorite was their short lived "Dolphone" which was a blue/white version of the Lafayette Com Phone, with the telephone style microphone. Unimetrics was an interesting brand that had a great reputation in the marine industry, and offered some unique products. We were dealers back in the 70's and 80's for them.
Unimetrics was owned by Lafayette. My very first SSB radio, was a Unimetrics Stingray 1. It was identical in every way to the Telsat SSB-50A, except for the covers, which were painted a sky blue color and the name plate, which was glued over the Lafayette model, which was cast into the front panel.
I have never seen another one, to this day. I sold that radio i the early 80's. I would say it was rare.
Pace/Royce did this as did Cobra/Uniden. I'm sure there were others.
In the Marine HF SSB realm, JRC was a big player. Raytheon rebadged at least one of their models and sold it as their own. I have two of them: One was a lab rat and is in excellent shape. The other came off the F/V Fundy Leader and looks like it had been fished in, smoked on and se-watered for years. Fortunately, none of the main boards appears to have sustained any damage or corrosion. I got a working PA too - that module alone is worth what I paid for the radio.
I worked at a big Marine HF-SSB dealer and was a service technician all through the 80's and 90's and also was a factory field tech for CAI Radio Co. So I remember the Raytheon/ JRC SSB's very well. Though they never sold well in the U.S. when badged as JRC, the Raytheon badged SSB's were fairly popular units for many years. Most of their popular models were quite easy to unlock and allow full frequency coverage as well as LSB. I had 3 or 4 Ray-152 SSB's, years back, and they were very robust units. I still have a NOS Raytheon automatic antenna tuner squirrled away for the 152 series.
I always thought it was intersting that Raytheon owned SBE Radio as well as Apelco, yet they chose to sell rebadged JRC stuff( or Hull Radio co. , going back further) instead of developing their own equipment.
Allow me to pick your brain a bit on the RAY-152:
When its LCD backlight is active on either High or Low intensity, a tone is being injected into the Mic Amp...and is of sufficient amplitude to produce 1/4 to 1/2w output power as indicated by an external wattmeter. Very noticeable to the locals. Turn the backlight Off and it goes away. From what I've gathered this was an issue with the DC-DC converter for the backlight - and a fix is supposed to exist though I've never been able to pin down any details. Sound familiar?
And on the unit in general:
It's basically a JST-135 chassis with fewer boards, a different front panel and display controller. Rear panel connections are the same. I have 135s and companion NRD-525 receivers which I run as twins - one with a CFQ-3003 cable set that allows true transceive and another with a homebrew Mute/Audio and Antenna In/Out cable set.
The 152 is paired with another 525 - one that doesn't have the VHF/UHF converter. This one has an EdVis PLAM (ECSS) board and several optional filters installed. Another custom cable set allows "separate" twins operation. I was lucky to get the RS-232 interface with mine and the rig has full support in wsjtx/flrig. Also have the tuner which feeds a 300' random wire.