[Milsurplus] Re: British Army Radio During WWII

[Joe Foley]

Good points! 

If you want a good description of how the mil-spec
rating came about read about the Brewster Buffalo,
that's an airplane, the same probably happened to
radio procurement.

The HT-4 was also a good example, it was a commercial
rig built mostly for Ham use.  The Army got hold of it
and "ruggedized" it and it became the BC-610!

There are stories of Hams donating their equipment for
military use at the early stages of the war also.

Joe



--- James C Whartenby <antqradio@juno.com> wrote:
> 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.


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