You might notice that the word 'COMMERCIAL' appears below to the name 'ECHOPHONE.' I do not know this for a fact, but I greatly suspect that the word 'commercial' was added to the brand name because these little radios were quite 'military' looking.

Echophone EC-1B Var. 2 Amateur-R Hallicrafters, The; Chicago, IL and Arlington/, build 1945/1946, 16 pictures, 3 schematics, 6 tubes, United States of America.

By adding the word 'commercial' to the brand name, the radio would not be mistaken for stolen government property by overzealous and over-ignorant officers and NCOs. I know from my own experiences in the military, something like this is necessary to prevent the lower ranking men from being accused of the worst kinds of things by their so-called 'superiors.' The main customer for these radios were America's soldiers, sailors and airmen, but they were also very popular with small airfields and with the Civil Air Patrol during and just after World War Two. You see, from almost the beginning of aviation until the late 1940s, aircraft communicated with each other and with their airfields on shortwave. Download Splinter Cell Double Agent Ps2 Iso Creator.

The shortwave circuits in these simple and inexpensive little radios performed quite well so that most airfield personnel preferred using an EC-1 for monitoring radio traffic rather than their more complex military radios. My EC-1 was used by the Civil Air Patrol and my EC-1b came from the Hancock Flying Field. The EC-1 in its Historical Context Echophone is a very old brand from the early days of radio and there are some beautiful old radios from that era. Leona Run Rapidshare Files. A young man named Halligan didn't have a lot of technical education, but he had big plans and he had saved his money as an employee of the ancestor of Radio Shack. Halligan wanted to build shortwave radios for the ham radio market, but he needed permission from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to use their patents.

David Sarnoff controlled RCA (with an iron fist) and he didn't give out licenses cheaply or to just any young guy who walked in. After being shown the door time after time, finally Halligan bought the old Echophone company just as it was about to go out of business and for a small amount of money, he got the Echophone brand name and their RCA license. Halligan then began to manufacture ham radios under the brand name 'Hallicrafters' and used the brand 'Echophone' for his line of simple and inexpensive radios marketed not to hams, but to ordinary men and women who needed something to entertain and keep them informed while serving in the military. The original EC-1 was the GI's radio of World War 2 and it was manufactured by the Hallicrafters company under the brand name 'Echophone Commercial.' It began production toward the end of 1940 and continued in production all through the war.