National HRO

The original National HRO was a 9-tube HF (shortwave) general coverage communications receiver manufactured by the National Radio Company of Malden, Massachusetts, United States.

James Millen (amateur radio call sign W1HRX) in Massachusetts was in charge of the mechanical design. According to several accounts, Herbert Hoover, Jr. (amateur radio call sign W6ZH), son of US President Herbert Hoover, and Howard Morgan (of Western Electric) designed the electronics in Hoover's garage in Pasadena, California. Dana Bacon (W1BZR) was also involved and wrote about the receiver as second author with James Millen. Some of National Radio's tool makers marked their overtime slips with HOR for "Hell Of a Rush." Management decided that a version of that abbreviation should be the name of the new receiver, choosing the slight alteration HRO to make it less objectionable. That was quickly countered by saying that HRO stood for "Helluva Rush Order".

The HRO receiver was first announced in QST magazine in October 1934 and shipped in March 1935, incorporating many design features requested by the fledgling airline industry that were also attractive to the amateur radio community. According to the 1935 instruction manual, the HRO price was US$233, the external power supply (to reduce heat in the receiver cabinet and hum) was US$26.50 less tubes, and a 7000 ohm speaker in a rack panel was US$30.00.

The HRO found widespread use during World War II as the preferred receiver of various Allied monitoring services, including Y-Service stations associated with the code-breaking group at Bletchley Park (Station X) in England. An estimated 1,000 standard HROs were initially purchased by Great Britain, and approximately 10,000 total saw use by the British in intercept operation, diplomatic communications, aboard ships and at shore stations as well as for clandestine use.

The two most distinctive features of this radio were its use of a micrometer-type dial, and plug-in sets of tuning coils that slid into a full-width opening at the bottom of the front panel. The dial, designed by Willam Graydon Smith, allowed for continuous analog tuning while digitally indicating incremental progress over a range of ten full turns of the large tuning knob that tuned with velvet smoothness. Ten times the circumference of the dial is 12 feet (nearly 4 m), which allowed for great frequency resolution. The four standard sets of coils, A, B, C, and D, covered 14-30, 7-14.4, 3.5-7.3, and 1.7-4 MHz, respectively. Two other sets of coils, E and F, sold separately, covered 960–2050 kHz and 480–960 kHz, respectively. Before each radio left the factory, a technician custom calibrated a set of A, B, C, and D coils for that particular radio, a process that took nearly 4 hours. Each of the four main sets of coils also had bandspread modes set by moving screws that limited the frequency range to 28-29.7, 14-14.4, 7-7.3, 3.5-4 MHz, respectively, for amateur radio use.

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