R. L. Drake Company

The company began as a manufacturer of low pass and high pass filters for the government and amateur radio market, and after World War II, produced amateur radio transmitters and receivers and communications receivers for maritime mobile service.

[1][2] Amateur stations made up of Drake gear were used on a number of record-breaking hot air balloon flights, the RMS Queen Mary, and the Rutan Voyager.

When founder Robert L. Drake died in 1975, the operation and management of the company was turned over to his 2nd son, Peter W.

Drake, LLC, reportedly for a purchase price of approximately $6.5 million, however, the companies will operate as separate entities; Blonder Tongue in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and R.L.

[5] Drake manufactured equipment for amateur radio operators and short wave listeners for more than three decades.

Second, it was designed specifically for reception of the relatively new and increasingly popular single sideband (SSB) mode of voice transmission.

It was followed two years later by the 2B, very similar in appearance but with improved performance and a new set of controls for adjusting the selectivity (bandwidth) and center frequency.Rather than produce a transmitter to match the 2B, Drake designed a new line of equipment beginning with an SSB transceiver, the TR-3, in 1963.

Its size was so small, in part, because the power supply was in a separate chassis, connected to the transceiver with a multi-conductor cable.

Beginning with the TR-3, Drake adopted a scheme for illuminating tuning dials and panel meters on its equipment using small incandescent bulbs behind greenish-blue transparent plastic filters.

[6] The "4-Line" twins satisfied a desire for high performance, operational flexibility and a set of features not possible to squeeze into the TR-4's small size.

Drake introduced the T-4 "reciter" which was a transmitter add on for the R4 series receivers (it had no PTO of its own and used the PTO and other signals from the R4 receiver to generate the transmit signal), making them a two piece "transceiver", but it saw limited sales and is a rare item on the used ham gear lists these days.

The 2-NT used a crystal oscillator to control its frequency, a requirement of the Novice license at that time (the restriction was later removed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)).

In 1978 Drake abandoned vacuum tubes (except for their use in power amplifiers) in favor of solid state designs and digital frequency synthesis.

A user could start with one or two and add more later by purchasing modular add-on RF modules factory installed.