[Milsurplus] Re: British Army Radio During WWII

[James C Whartenby]

Greetings William and the group
What I meant by "commercial quality" is that the equipment was
manufactured by the best commercial standards of the time.  That being
said, I don't believe there were many Military Specifications of any
consequence at the beginning of WWII.  It was the poor reliability of the
equipment that initiated the Mil-Specification and Mil-Standard programs
as we now know them.  Yes, commercial practice varied from manufacturer
to manufacturer with some better then others.  But that is one of the
problems, no standard practice.  With the US building up for war, almost
any competent manufacturer could and did build electronics.  They
undoubtedly used the best standards of practice and components available
but the end equipment couldn't survive (meet specification) after the
abuse of extreme temperatures, humidly or shock.  Even in storage, let
alone field use.

It is interesting to note that commercial components available today meet
or exceed mil standards.  I have been out of this field for several years
so I am not positive about the revisions to specifications.  But I
believe the present component quality is so high that there have not been
many revs to the mil specifications for components like resistors,
capacitors and inductive components.

As for ETs attesting to equipment reliability in WWII, the several that I
have had the pleasure to talk to did not agree.  Agreed, by the Korean
War, better equipment was working it's way into the inventory.  This is
the equipment that benefited from the lessons learned during WWII.  Don't
get me wrong here, I love this milradio stuff.  I go out of my way to
find examples (good or bad) of ground and aircraft HF receivers of that
era.  But I also know that it will take a bit of TLC and effort to get
quite a few of them up and running again.  And its not just the Ham-mods,
some of which were done to the highest standards of practice.

A personal example.  When I was in the Philippines in the late 60's, the
Air Base (Mactan) were I was stationed, was getting a new ground to air
UHF system.  One of the single channel UHF receivers, an R-278 I believe,
was defective, new out of the box.  A bad (shorted) molded capacitor was
the culprit.  I think it had been manufactured 10 or so years earlier.

Regards from Arkansas,
Jim

On Sun, 25 May 2003 23:12:58 -0400 (EDT) William Donzelli
<aw288@osfn.org> writes:
> I can't agree with this. The equipment used early in the war, 
> especially the Navy's stuff, wasn't generally commercial quality (yes,
some 
> sets were just retagged commercial units, but they were not generally
put 
> in  front line service). A quick look at an RAL, TBK, DP, or whatever, 
> will  show non-commercial practices. Even something like a BC-375 isn't

> very  commercial.
> 
> Incidently, the stuff the Navy used in World War 2 was incredibly 
> reliable (discounting the radars, of course) - most ETs from the era 
> (or Korea) would agree.
> 
> William Donzelli
> aw288@osfn.org