If you use
quartz crystals for any of your vintage radio gear, you'd better get your orders in NOW!
International Crystal will be closing their doors in the very near future.
This is quite a blow to the Amateur Radio community, as IC not only makes superb crystals, but they have information on probably 99.999% of all radios, scanners, walkie-talkies, and just about any other device made that uses a quartz crystals, and make make custom crystals having the exact properties required to work correctly in the gear.
They could supply crystals that :just worked" for that old BearCat scanner, piece of obscure military gear, or any Drake, Hallicrafters, Heathkit, etc, etc, etc rig ever sold.
They will be sorely missed!
Looks like
JAN Crystals is about the only place left.....
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Oh, my - one of the joys of my teen years was rebuilding old walkie-talkies, and adding frequencies to various scanners. I do hope there's someone else who also sells the crystals.
ReplyDeleteThese guys:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.expandedspectrumsystems.com/
Can supposedly supply many different crystals, but I haven't yet cruised through their website.
Sorry to hear that, but I suppose it's not surprising. I have at least a couple of their crystals around here, too.
ReplyDeleteWith the advent of PLLs, the need for crystals dropped dramatically. Pretty much everything digital has a crystal in it, but only one, and they're not high quality crystals like ICM makes.
Yeah, nobody cares about things like "residual FM", "Phase Noise", "Spectral Purity", or any of the other good things a properly designed, low-noise crystal oscillator can provide.
DeleteOne product line I worked on at Hughes was a low noise crystal oscillator used for Really Neat Stuff.
It was so good we had to test it in a screen room, as the "normal" RF background at the plant was so much higher than the output of the oscillator that we couldn't tell if it was in spec during final test.
Another sign of 'progress'... dammit...
ReplyDelete