[Hammarlund] Hammarlund SP-600 History Item

[jdteske at verizon.net]

 Resend....this time trying plain text.  
 
I don't have all that much knowledge specifically about SP-600 series radios, but I did have a 35
year career in the world of intelligence intercept aka SIGINT (signals intelligence.) By the time
I entered the profession in 1964, the SP-600s were pretty much replaced by R-390s, but some SP-600s
were still retained as search receivers. An R-390 was pretty cumbersome for searching a lot of HF-spectrum
in a short period of time and search intercept operators jealously guarded their Hammarlunds. I personally
had a rather dim view of the R-390s, not that they weren't good receivers, they are (or were), but they were
a maintenance nightmare, especially if you were a 'bean counter' as I was at NSA having to plan budgets
for parts provisioning, maintenance training and the like for a sizable part of the 1000s of R-390s we had
in inventory, even through the 1990s, the point at which I retired. I was last involved with field planning
in 1995, more as the institutional memory. My active field support role ended in the 1980s. Though I did bring 
my ham radio knowledge to this field, I was a "weenie" ["We're from HQ, we're here to help you"] manager
and did none of the actual work myself. In our secretive world, we had initiated many modifications and
variant to these and other hardware which were not done by commercial builders (Hammarlund, Collins, National
and a dozen others. Towards the end of their life cycles, strict configuration controls were not maintained
and some modifications were done ad hoc by local maintenance shops, particularly if you had a sharp
maintenance NCO. So when these receivers were replaced by newer technologies and released to the
Defense Dept. surplus disposers (there are several alphabet soups agencies that did this), or 
the GSA disposal facilities. and most were released without their maintenance records.
One might find all sorts of mods, for which there is no documentation or which will vary from the the manufacturers
specifications. There was a big surplus auction facility at Ft. Meade, MD which disposed of NSA's unclassified
hardware. There was nothing particularly secret about most of these radios. There were some radios we did
not want returned to inventory. One such was an ancient tube VLF voltmeter which in the 40s and 50s had been
used to break out VHF multichannel signals. There were hundreds of these in inventories but we wanted to
replace them with modern equipment. Whenever we'd request demods from the services they's haul these things
out of inventory. We wanted modern solid state devices that could do 24 channels in a small box, not something
that required six relay racks full of obsolete equipment. I was once at a field facility and replaced this old stuff.
The CO wanted to return the old equipment to a warehouse. 
"That's the last thing I want you to do, I'm trying to get rid of this stuff. When was the last time you had a Thermite 
emergency destruction drill?" 

"Never"

"Well let's get the base fire department to stand by and go to the firing range and make sure none of these ever
gets used again." We reduced them to molten metal and glass and the fire department had a great time.

We didn't do that for SP-600s or R-390s.... I was looking out for my fellow hams.

Jon, W3JT