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Explorers in the Richard Byrd expedition regaled Americans with stories of their discoveries at the bottom of the Earth through Collins’ radio equipment.
Amateur Radio
Described in the December 1935 issue of Collins Signal.
The Autotune® permitted remote tuning through mechanical repositioning.
Any control with a shaft – a variable capacitor, a rotary switch, or a variable inductor – could be returned to a preset position.
Commercial Avionics
Braniff Airways was the first airline to install the Collins 17D transmitter on their fleet of Douglas DC-3s and other aircraft. The 17D was a 100-watt, 10-channel transmitter featuring the Autotune® mechanism – allowing rapid adjustment of plane-to-plane, plane-to-ground and tower frequencies.
Not only was this VFO hermetically sealed, it was permeability-tuned and precisely linear by virtue of the Mechanical Corrector Mechanism.
Collins Radio Co. engineer Ted Hunter championed the development of this successful product.
Military Radio
The first product became the AN/ARC-27, capable of tuning 1,750 channels.
This radio was a military UHF transceiver that operated between 225.0-399.9 MHz and transmitted at 9 watts. It featured a second ‘guard’ receiver monitoring 243 MHz.
Commercial Avionics
Collins developed a means of communicating “over the horizon” between far distant stations, using VHF or UHF beams focused with highly sensitive parabolic antennas. The greatest portion of such signals is lost to space, but Collins engineers discovered that a small portion is reflected by both the troposphere and ionosphere and could be detected with specially designed high gain antennas up to 1200 miles from the transmitting site.
Commercial Avionics
Collins Radio Co. mechanical engineers successfully integrated three aircraft instruments into one unit.
Commercial Telecommunications
The 180L Automatic Antenna Tuner would go on to spawn several versions: 180L-1 thorough 180L-3.
Under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission, Collins Radio Co. delivered the first commercially-built cyclotrons to Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY and to Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL.
Military Telecommunications
The OA-252 is a 5,000-watt HF (1.5 to 30Mhz) RF amplifier. The OA-252 could be manually tuned or provide 10 preset channels using the Autotune® mechanism.
Space Telecommunications
First to use Ultra-High Frequency transmission, Collins Radio Engineers bounced signals off the moon to a National Bureau of Standards field station in Sterling Virginia.
By 1945 it was known that the sun emitted weak radio signals. In 1954 Collins Radio developed a radio receiver and tracking antenna to allow a ship at sea to accurately determine its position relative to the sun even in cloudy weather when optical means were ineffective.
Commercial Telecommunications
Collins Kineplex was the first practical long distance, high speed data transmission system, introduced in the mid-1950s. It incorporated pulse-code modulation and predicted wave signaling for superior signal / noise operation, and a 40:1 improvement of band width use compared to contemporary telephone circuitry. The first commercially successful modulator / demodulator (MODEM) was a key component of Kineplex.
This system was also the first application of a design theme Collins was to use widely in the ensuing years: modularity. Standardized planar circuit boards were mounted in standardized rack-mounted modules, the forerunner of the ATR “black box”, which became the standard in avionics.
Amateur Radio
The KWM-1 is the first ham radio (transmitter – receiver) that shared circuitry, making it a true transceiver. As a mobile unit: first SSB, first VOX and speaker anti-trip circuits, first all-transistor power supply, first automatic load control, first precision tuned VFO, first to use a mechanical filter, first crystal-controlled BFO and receiver HF oscillator.
Space Telecommunications
Collins Radio Co. received a contract from North American Aviation to design the first communications and navigation system for use on their rocket-propelled X-15 aircraft.
Space Telecommunications
During Project ECHO, Collins Radio Co. engineers completed the first two-way voice communication between Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Richardson, Texas bouncing radio signals off the ECHO-I satellite. This was achieved on August 13th during the satellite’s eleventh orbit.
Space Telecommunications
Collins Radio equipment aboard the Mercury Freedom 7 Spacecraft linked Astronaut Alan Shepard’s voice to ground during the historic May 5th sub-orbital flight.
Commercial Avionics
Rockwell Standard’s Jet Commander became the first business aircraft certified airworthy for Category II operations.
The aircraft, using Collins’ All Weather Landing System, fulfilled the Federal Aviation Commission’s stringent requirements.
The Spring 1966 issue of Collins Signal tells the story.
Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association
690 Eastview Drive
Robins, IA 52328