I call it the "King of Disco". Good looks on the outside, but nothing to speak of inside.
DAK hired a Korean manufacturer to make an outright copy of a SSB CB circuit board used in radios made in Japan by Cybernet.
A poor copy. I don't know the vendor's name, but they were clearly learning how to build a CB. They never made enough of these to actually learn how.
The power supply regulator and the AM modulator were totally suicidal. Trick was, if the AM modulation was turned down to around 80 percent max it would survive the warranty period. But just as soon as it was turned up, POOF!
The tubes are simply grafted onto the solid-state radio pc board circuits, so to speak.
The double-sided pc board technology they used was fatally flawed, and caused chronic intermittent dropout problems.
And that's just scratching the surface. Just try to find a replacement channel selector when (not 'if') it wears out. Made from that rarest of elements unobtanium. And the channel digits? Same deal.
A nice shelf decoration, if you have a really large shelf with a really large empty spot on it.
In all fairness, we did work out fixes for most of the design/build issues it had back in the 1980s. But the cost of that much labor and parts was borderline-insane back then. What it would cost now will buy you a decent used ham HF transceiver that actually still works.
One last thought. DAK sold a fairly full line of mobile and base radios. They sold a AM-only Mark 9 base station, too. Just as pathetic and just as pretty, but no SSB.
When was the last time you saw or even heard of a DAK mobile? Far as I know they have mostly all gone to the local landfill by now. They simply sucked. Only that enormous cabinet and fancy front panel have saved their base-station models from the same fate.
73
