macdonald instrements vintage walkie talkies..

scored these at the same place as the old projector, $1.00 each *grin*
they are as close to as pristine condition as they can get! i honestly dont think they were ever even used, pretty chrome and very well made, they have huge 6 foot antennas on them and probubly have one hell of a range! idk if they work yet, they take 8 aa batteries each and im gunna get them next payday. the date of manufacture is jan-1977. cocaine cowboys era! haha. these are somewhat obscure, can anyone tell me about them??

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie010.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie002.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie003.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie004.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie008.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie007.jpg

http://i1119.photobucket.com/albums/k637/stereorobb/walkies/walkie001.jpg

Those were very common, maybe 1 W on 11 meters. About all they are good for is short range communications, maybe up to a quarter mile or so. Whether they have crystals in all three channel slots is questionable; you need to open them and see. My guess is that there is only one crystal in each for receive and one for transmit. If you are lucky, both units are on the same channel.

I would have been all over them bad boys like White on Rice, too...

Often the older walkie talkies preform much better than the new ones. Growing up in the 90's I had 2-3 sets of newer dinky plastic units that had around 100ft range maybe more. then at a long gone honey hole of a thrift where I found many a treasure I bought a matched pair late 60's-early 80's units with retractable antennas and those became the "good pair" that me and my friends would try and call shotgun on using in our games. All the ones I had happened used the same frequency so depending on batteries I could pass out as many as 8 units.

I dunno. They look a lot like a Midland unit I had way back when and they claimed a full 4 watts output.

I agree, around 1 watt, 11 meters.

I have a few EF Johnson 109s that are the American Made version of that. The range is really kinda based on the band/channels noise floor.

I would really like to get some custom crystals made and make one of mine a 10 meter QRP radio. Say 28.350, 28.400 and 28.450 or something like that. It would take some tweaking, but I bet I could get it to work.

The 10M band has been poppin lately and making a dx contact on an early transistor handheld would be hot