A Complete Product Offering Including Antennas and Housing

In the Microwave Market, having only entered three years before in 1952, Collins had installed systems on the ground and running by 1955 in both Transhorizon and Direct Link Microwave.  

Early Transhorizon Microwave Installation – circa 1955

VHF (30-50 or 70 MHz) and UHF (700-1000 MHz) Transhorizon equipment would first start to appear in the General Catalogs in 1956 (Just high power – typically 10-40 kW transmitters – at first) and then a full line of Exciters, Modulators, Receivers, Antennas and accessories for both VHF and UHF – as well as Direct Microwave. By 1958 Collins was offering this full line-up and even Truck-Transportable or Air-Transportable fully established systems that could be brought in and set up in a matter of hours. Complete systems could be transported long distances by aircraft, land or sea using the transportable systems that are shown here. Copied from the Collins Radio 1957 Annual Report  

Clearly the major customer for such systems was the government. A version of this equipment would be used in the DEW line communication Networks that were set up in the ‘50s.

For Direct Microwave, Collins offered a line-up of Receivers and Transmitters that covered the 6.0 to 8.5 GHz band as well as accessories and antennas. They looked a lot like the KWT-6 construction.

Shown below is an example of the evolvedmicrowave equipment and complex antenna systems offered in a 1966 promotional ad.

In addition to the transmission equipment involved – be it HF or Transhorizon VHF, UHF or Direct – Collins also developed and successfully marketed what would go on to become the next standard Data Processing/Modulation system named Kineplex. First announced in 1957 in the Collins Signal Magazine, the products were fully presented in the 1958 General Catalog and provided the capability to transmit quality data over wire line, cable, carrier or microwave transmission using synchronously encoded phase shift modulation. This system employed four equally spaced tones in the 21 KHz region. Each tone could accept data from two channels making a total of 8 shipped channels capable of (Do not laugh) a whopping 300 bits/second each. This meant that the overall data rate was 2400 bits/sec.  This was a HUGE data rate in 1958.

Below are three representative pages from the 1960 Collins Radio General Catalog showing the current Kineplex Product Offering.