Redifon R551A Ships Main Receiver
  • Power: 24V DC from batteries (or external source) or AC mains 100-240V 50/60Hz
  • Wavebands: Continuously tuneable from 15KHz to 29.99Mhz
  • Sensitivity: typically 0.35uV@ 10dB S/N for CW or 4uV for voice
  • Devices: Double-conversion circuit, approx 80 transistors & a handful of IC's
  • Released: 1968 - 1980
  • Original Price: c.£5000

Return to The Boatanchor Collection
This qualifies as boatanchor for the weight alone! A large, heavy soild-state ships main receiver with a unique tuning arrangement. Built mainly for the Ministry Of Defence from the late 1960's onwards by Redifon Communications (now part of the Thales Group) - a major player in the marine communications and navigation markets - taking up slack from Marconi and Decca.

The large silver wheel is a two-speed drive (the inner ring being slow) for the range of 0 to 100KHz in 1KHz steps (which makes for awkward band cruising but then they were not built for that purpose) as displayed on the odometer type analogue display. The three knobs to the left of this display switch in 100KHz, 1MHz and 10Mhz steps respectively - the leftmost knob only has three positions for 0, 10 and 20MHz.

This allows for incredibly accurate tuning and the stability of this receiver is quite amazing. My set has been built into a table case but, ordinarily, these sets were designed for a conventional 19" rack mounting.

Last updated 26th July 2003