[Boatanchors] BC-639 Military Receiver

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

The tubes in the BC-640 were 24-Gs, IIRC.

That experience you are citing I guess is from the days when the military
services were prohibited from buying any new VHF gear as a way to get them
moved into the military UHF 225-400 MHz band.

I was at Edwards AFB in the early 1960s and we had a need to operate on
the VHF aviation frequencies as there were a lot of contractors on the
base and that sort of thing that were operating on civilian frequencies.
So we had a lot of ARC-3s with AC power supplies as a way to operate
those frequencies.  There was a BC-640, but it was so bad that it wound
up at the MARS station.

Then there was some mission they flew from time to time that involved
flying to Europe and required civilian VHF radio operation.  So we had
a big suitcase full of crystals for ARC-3s that they would check out
whenever they needed to fly that mission.

I was gratified to see a few years ago that the AF now has modern
equipment that will operate on VHF and UHF.



jhhaynes at earthlink dot net