Wahoo! I got a t-47/ART-13 today!

[Dodge man]

I went to a little hamfest yesterday and picked up a BC-348Q Receiver. I also talked to a ham there that said that he had a T-47 Transmitter that he MIGHT be willing to part with. I went and looked at it and it's a beauty! US Navy model made (I THINK) in 1955. It has the original Calibration manual with it and has the 200-1600 Kc Low Frequency module installed. It's clean as can be and the owner had it in operation up until about 6 months ago so everything should still be in working condition. I made a deal with the owner and this will be going into my radio jeep as soon as I can get the radio cabinets made.

I'm looking for the CU-24 shunt capacitor for this system. It's three 25 Mf caps mounted on a small plate. Each cap has a binding post on top and you can connect 1, 2 or 3 caps to the antenna to tune it for different antenna types/lengths. Does anyone have one to spare?

 

[NDT]

Looks like a nice radio. Can you tell us what the Navy used this for, I thought the A in ART was for Aircraft.

 

[Dodge man]

I believe that the Navy also used them in some of their their heavy aircraft such as PBYs. Apparently they also used some onboard ships since I have seen pictures of a massive 60Hz power supply that the Navy used with this radio. The Marines also had some and used them in several different Forward Air Controller applications. In my case, this radio and a BC-348 receiver and an RT-178/ARC-27 UHF radio are going into my MRC-35A FAC Jeep restoration.

FWIW before the JAN system was established, these were called T-47s but after JAN they were called T-47/ART-13 or just ART-13s. This transmitter together with a BC-348 receiver was AN/ARC-8 communications system.

This from Wikipedia:

The earlier AN/ART-13 was widely used in post-World War II Navy aircraft, being paired up post-World War II with the Navy's AN/ARR-15 auto-tune receiver. The resulting communications system was known as the AN/ARC-25. Its replacement began with the Collins AN/ARC-38 AM transceiver in the early 1950s, which in turn was upgraded to the AN/ARC-38A USB transceiver in the late 1950s. The Russians made nearly exact copies of the AN/ART-13 transmitter (called RSB-70 and R-807) for use on their military aircraft. It is thought that they obtained AN/ART-13 units from battle damaged B-29 bombers that landed in Russia during World War II. It was well known that the Russians copied the B-29 bomber calling their version the Tu-4.