i found a AN/PRC-77

[NCS]

I was at a Flea market today and i ran in too a nice fellow selling a PRC-77 , it is in very nice shape has a whip ant. , hand mike and battery converter to take D batteries . He wants 300 for all .
My Question is should i buy it and what could i do with it ?
MY background is that i'm a ARMY 25U Signal Soldier , in a Line unit ( I'm the only commo guy ) . i mess with radio's a lot , Military and civilian . I have my own commo shop with lots of extra stuff that the Armys throw away and i keep the extras in my shop and fix them in my free time for backup's , just like every good commo guy/gal should do . So i would have plenty of extra parts for the PRC-77 if i did buy it . but what could i do with it ? Could i talk to ham's with it on 6 meter with it ? Or any radios ?
Sorry i don't know a whole lot about HAM radios , i always wanna get my License but i never have time , that and you guys word every thing different from what i'm used too in the Army . I understand that i have too get the license too use this to talk on 6 meter , but i'm thinking more down the road when i have free time and a license . That and i don't wanna see a part of History go to waste .

The flea market ends tomorrow so any advice you have would be nice .


- SAPPER1

 

[popnokick]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

The only hesitation I would have if I was buying it would be whether it worked, could I fix it, and could I get parts? It seems you've already answered the last two concerns.

 

[Comint]

I'm sure the PRC-77 Channels are 50 kHz Bandwidth, the same as the PRC-25, and even Amateurs don't use that kind of bandwidth these days. Also, the PRC-25/PRC-77 (and a lot of similar military equipment) have that annoying 500 Hz tone on their transmissions (Filtered out with military equipment, but quite noticeable on civilian gear).

Save your money, unless you are a military radio collector.

--
Comint

 

[jhooten]

Buy it if the price is right. The price on them has done nothing but go up. Use it then if it is not what you want you can, at worst case, sell it and get your money back.

There are a sub-group of hams that enjoy using green radios.
6-Meter Calling Frequencies for Military Radios

 

[prcguy]

$300 is not a great price but it is a fair price for the package you described if the radio has no issues. The radio alone can be had on occasion in the $200-$250 range with no accessories.

For ham use its basically a 1 channel 6m radio and 51.0MHz is the national military radio channel for these wide band FM sets. The tone squelch is 150Hz, not 500 as previously mentioned and the tone deviation is around 3KHz, which is very annoying to listen on a non military radio.

For monitoring use the 77 is ok if your near a military base and they have VHF lo-band frequencies to monitor. The radio can sit on channel all day and not make a sound until a valid 150Hz tone is detected from another military radio. Unfortunately the radio does not have a regular noise squelch so you either listen for other military radios squelched or listen to everyone else without any squelch.
prcguy