E. F. Johnson Company
210 Second Ave. SW, Waseca, MN

Tradename Viking

Manufacturers of commercial and HAM radio transmitters as well as transmitter parts.

In the QST magazine May 1929 they offered transmitting and rectifier tubes in an advertisement, the manufacturer of which is unknown.

In 1923 Edgar F Johnson, who was born in 1899, founded E F Johnson Company in Waseca, Minnesota and began selling radio transmitter parts to radio amateurs and broadcasters. The address was 210 Second Ave SW, Waseca. It produced a 20 page catalogue titled "Hamalog". In 1925 the company began manufacturing their own transmitter parts. QST magazine from May 1929 shows an advertisement for three transmitting tubes (types 550, 560 and 570). The ad states that other transmitting and rectifier tubes were available. It is not known if the company made any of these tubes but in the 1940's and 1950's, RCA made tubes for them. (The 7061 and 6BL7GTA are two of these. A mobile radio system was developed by the company for Minnesota police cars in 1939.

World War Two saw the company totally involved in Defence production and the company won the Army-Navy Efficiency Award for outstanding production efficiency. By 1949 the first complete transmitter, the Viking 1 was developed. The Messenger 202 AM transceiver was introduced in 1961 and a line of FM two way radios was on the market in 1967. The company signed an agreement with Bell Telephone Laboratories to make cell-site radio transmitters for Bell's proposed Cellular Radio System. This was in 1975. The system was first built in Chicago in 1979. E F Johnson became a Public Company in 1976 and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1980 and 1989 trunked radio systems were introduced and in 1991, E F Johnson retired.

In 1995 Johnsons signed an agreement with various US Government agencies to develop products which complied with this agreement. Also in that year, 3e Technologies Inc was founded in Rockville, Maryland to provide wireless communications to US Military customers. Johnson's acquired this company in 2006. E F Johnson's parent company - EFJ Inc - was listed in the NASDAQ on 2004 and also in that year, the engineering side of the business was transferred to Irving, Texas. In 2008 the EFJ Inc name was changed to E F Johnson Technologies. In the same year the company acquired a US$10 million dollar contract to supply the Yukon Territory with a compliant system of radio infrastructure. In the following years many radio devices were developed and manufactured and the Viking trade name was used on a number of these.

In 2014 E F Johnson's was acquired by JVCKenwood Corporation, with the company being allowed to trade under the old name. In 2017 Kenwood announced the new serries of Viking 5000, 6000 and 7000 radios. A look at the ebay listings for E F Johnson in July 2017 shows over 800 items offered for sale. These range from radio parts - tube sockets, tuning condensers, head phones, tipjacks, lapel microphones to Viking transceivers audio amplifiers and the like.