[ARC5] Was C-48/ARC-5 - Now A.R.C. Prototypes

[Michael Tauson]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Mike Morrow <kk5f at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I should have added a caveat to my statement that excluded prototype
> and developmental items.  From my outlook, those are interesting...sometimes
> very interesting...engineering stories.  But I consider an item to be a
> proper part of a system only if it actually survived to the point that
> it was deployed for military mission use.

Ah, okay.  My interest is far deeper due to the research I'm doing for
my book so everything's fair game, including concepts that never left
the drawing board.  This is why I sometimes bore in on details to what
is a probably annoying degree and why I consider the SCR-274-N an
A.R.C. product even though WE built the vast majority of them,
including making manufacturing improvements along the way.

Even here, though, some non-A.R.C. items have to be included such as
the WE-produced VHF components and the ZA, ZB, AN/ARR-1 and AN/ARR-2
simply due to their close association/integration with the other
bitzenpieces.

Also, my time scale is broader, ranging from 1927 through the "Cessna
Era", though the latter will be difficult to manage due to
documentation problems.  I have an excellent outline to follow
provided by Gordon White leading up to Cessna's purchase of A.R.C. but
after that is a fog that I need to cut through in one way or another.

> Such items
> should be listed outside of any canonical list of a system's components
> to avoid any misinterpretation that military end-users ever saw it.

Agreed, though they will be listed together.  Prototype only or
limited production pieces will be marked as such and pieces that never
left the drawing board won't go past the text portion.

> My opinion only, of course.

And a valid one.  :-)

>>As a side note, the NRL design included two separate crystal channels
>>plus retained the ability to be tuned which the A.R.C. redesign did
>>not.
> There was a control box for such on ebay a year or so ago.  I stay
> away from prototypes, so I didn't track the auction to see who got
> it for how much.

I saw it, though I didn't bid on it.  Basically, it was a 23155
control box with side cars attached.  This is one of the things I need
to chase down at the NASM or Silver Hill.

>>It was the latter version that reduced the cockpit controls, not
>>the Navy's which, instead, only complicated them more.
> Are you referring to the final AN/ARC-5 configuration, using the
> C-30A and C-38 controls?  If so, I'd say I don't know how much
> simpler a set of controls for three receivers and two (usually)
> transmitters (including four channels of VHF) could have been made.

Yep.  That was A.R.C.'s answer to the messy way the NRL did things and
was, to me, an elegant solution.

> I love the old Aircraft Radio Company gear, but I think A.R.C.
> is often credited way too highly.  Their last *major* military
> contribution was the ARA/ATA in 1940.  The AN/ARC-5 LF/MF/HF
> system is really only a minor enhancement to that rapidly obsolete
> ARA/ATA type of MF/HF command set.

*chuckling* ... Okay, I don't want to get into the HF vs VHF
"discussion" and I know that you see the SCR-274-N as being a WE
product where, for my purposes, I see it as an A.R.C. product.  That
said, the LF/MF/HF A.R.C. equipment served through the war with the
R-23A/ARC-5 (if nothing else) used into the 70s while the LF/MF
equipment and their earlier work with VHF equipment, though not used
during WW II, provided the basis for the postwar Type 12 etc systems.
(That gets into another part of the company's history that would
likely be way boring to others here so I won't go there.)  It did what
it had to do and it did it well.

A.R.C. wasn't perfect by any stretch and, as someone whose opinion I
respect highly mentioned to me, their ergonomics sucked most
bodaciously (along with other issues) but as Gordon White pointed out
a few months ago - right place, right time, right product.

BEst regards,

Michael, WH7HG
-- 
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Hiki Nô!