[Milsurplus] Re: [ARC5] SCR-274N Makes It on ARRL.ORG

[J. Forster]

WA5CAB at cs.com wrote:

> Well, I've mostly quit getting into these "discussions"  as they usually
> produce more heat than light.  But it is a fact that the majority of the post-war
> and 50's comments in the Amateur press condemning various military sets as TVI
> generators is a myth born of QST commercial advertiser's trying to sell their
> new stuff plus abject incompetence and a propensity to try to get twice as
> much power out of the sets as they were ever designed to produce. [snip]

RIGHT ON !!!!  The WS 19 was much maligned, but it was largely because it was often
operated without its Variometer which resonated the antenna's capacitance and
suppressed RFI.

The ham gear maker's self interest was not something I'd thought of much, but you are
absolutely right. How could they sell their wares for tens to hundreds of times the
price of surplus gear? So they trashed it. Part of the problem may also have been
that many people who learned radio in the service were less than engineers, to put it
politely, and had little real understanding of how the sets worked, beyond how to
operate them in a professionally installed station (e.g.: airplane)

-John