A little backstory. A guy I work withs’ uncle died a few years ago. While his family was cleaning out his house, they found a bunch of old vintage gadgets (typical for an elderly person) one of them being a radar detector. It didn’t have a box or anything, but everyone seems to think it’s from sometime in the late 50’s. It has a piece of documentation with it (pictured) as well.
I’ve been meaning to get pictures to post for a while and just happened to remember today. Figured you guys would be interested. It would be a pretty cool addition to a classic hotrod/showcar.
no idea if it still works or not. Oddly enough, I believe that port on the side is a 1/4" audio out lol I’m guessing so you could hear the beeps in Hi-Fidelity?
In the early 60’s, a radar detector was available commercially. This detector was the Radar Sentry, made by Radatron, Inc. out of Tonawanda, New York. It was featured on the cover of the September, 1961 issue of Popular Electronics
The Radar Sentry was priced at $39.95 in 1961, which roughly equates to around $250 in today’s dollars. The early units detected S-Band radar operating at 2.455 GHz. Later units were adopted to detect both S-Band and X-band radar. The Sentry was actually cordless, running off of 2 AA batteries. According to Radatron, they should last 800-100 Hours, equating to 35,000 miles of driving (assuming an average speed of 35 MPH!). For mounting, it was recommended that Sentry be clipped to the sun visor.
This must be a Gen two or something. ill try to find a pic of the old ass cast aluminum box that i had. The thing was gigantic. there was no way in hell you could hang that off of the visor.
See that function is kinda hard to explain. The way it works is as follows. The rays that it emits vibrate the atoms of the garage door out of time phase. Thus making them barely visible and easy to pass through. Ok it makes sense in the star trek universe lol.
