Auto Scrap Yard MW-HF Radio (as seen on "Adam-12")

[ssmith39]

One episode of "Adam-12" has Malloy and Reed visit a scrapyard. While there, the owner of the yard uses a radio for a transaction (image 1 below). The radio is a Sonar marine band radio (image 2 below). I remember visiting junkyards during the '70s and hearing those radios over a loudspeaker. Does anybody know anything about the frequencies used, what service (i.e. fixed station), etc.?

 

[teufler]

According to a radio museum, they operated on 2182 kc, they were really a ship to shore radio. Either the show had something to do with a shore based entity transmitting to a ship or they just got it as a prop and didn't expect your keen eyes to see the radio. ha ha

 

[mmckenna]

I used to have a similar Marine HF radio.
You could crystal them for anywhere in their range, which was pretty wide. Don't recall the specifics, but no reason why someone (probably) couldn't crystal them to one of the LMR bands around 25MHz.
From what I can find, they did 35 watts. 12 volt supply. Have not been able to find any specifics about their usable coverage. Marine HF has a lot of chunks of spectrum in the HF bands.

And I agree, probably just a prop. A lot of old radios from the 40's through 60's looked like that. I had an old VHF High Band radio that looked similar.

 

[ko6jw_2]

LAPD used MW up until the middle 1960's. I used to hear them on a short wave radio at night about a hundred miles away. I believe it was one way system with the cars that had radios answering back on VHF. The calls I heard were mainly for the South Central Division. The frequency was in the 2.1Khz range. The police band started at about 1.7Khz. Cars that were not equipped with radios used police call boxes to talk to headquarters. The call boxes had blue flashing lights to indicate when a car needed to call in.

LAFD had a single frequency assigned to it. I believe it was 33.70Mhz. At one time the FCC turned down their request for an additional channel.

 

[ko6jw_2]

Just refreshed my memory. The original LAPD MW frequency was 1730Kz and later 2366Kz was added.