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My first introduction to National Company was care of the school radio society. G3XMM, the chemistry teacher, ran the club and kept his wartime HRO-5 on the school premises (His wife probably didn‘t allow it in the house).
In those days (the early 1970’s) government surplus equipment such as 19 and 62 sets and R1155s were readily available. When I was 15 I bought an HRO-MX receiver for the princely sum of £18 which I’d seen advertised in the RadCom.
The set was in pretty good shape and I used it for a number years both to listen on the HF amateur bands and as a tunable IF to listen on 2 metres and when the OSCAR 7 amateur satellite became operational I used it to receive the 10metre downlink. The doppler shift as the satellite processed from horizon to horizon was evident as I had tune the HRO first up then down in frequency.
I sold the set a few years later for what I paid for it - and have regretted doing so ever since.
Around 1980 the late G2HX passed on to me a non working but tidy HRO-500. At the time I did sufficient investigation to realise that it had a serious fault in its synthesiser but didn’t have the time or inclination to get on and fix it.
For the next twenty years, the set languished in a cupboard. In September this year (2004) I finally decided to try and restore it to working condition.
Six weeks later after a number of weekends patiently working round the synthesiser circuitry stage by stage fixing a succession of faults I finally got it to go.
I knew the HRO-500 dated from the 1960s and was rarer than the wartime HRO, at least in the UK, but beyond that I knew little about its origins or for that matter the company that had made it. So I set about searching the internet to try and find out more. The story that follows is the result of that search.
To tell National's story in a limited number of words I have, by necessity, missed out some names and have described selected products. Further information can be found by referencing the links at the end.
Also, I found great difficulty in discovering the history of the years between 1970 and 1990. The description of "Declining Years" is the best I can piece together from limited information.
If you have further information about National Company or corrections to the story presented here, please e-mail me at "steve AT s-ric DOT demon DOT co DOT uk"
I gratefully acknowledge the kind permission of the following to use photographs from their web sites.
Click on any of the photographs to link to the original web sites.
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