[Milsurplus] Re: Beginning of use of UHF aero radios

[Mike Hanz]

WA5CAB at cs.com wrote:

>Earliest UHF aircraft set manual that I can find that I have a date on is AN 
>16-30ARC12-3, Handbook of Maintenance Instruction Radio Set AN/ARC-12 dated 01 
>September 1947. 
>

I have that manual, but I have a feeling it is for the postwar buy of 
these transceivers, an earlier production run appearing to have been a 
Navy driven requirement whose acquisition was contracted under 
NOa(s)-8930, the label on the two I have here.  There was a follow-on 
contract - NOa(s)-8934 - on a parts unit downstairs and that is 
mentioned in the 1947 manual as being a Navy contract under which 
purchases were already flowing.  The _History of Engineering Science in 
the Bell System_ sez that Western Electric produced 1,200 of these sets, 
developed by Bell Labs - presumably before the war's end, as most of the 
footnotes for the chapter are historical reviews published in 1946.  It 
also mentions Bell Labs developing the AN/ARC-19, which looks a little 
bit like the ARC-27 in frontal aspect ratio.  Interestingly enough, I 
have a thick ARC-19 manual produced by Bendix in 1950, but it details an 
ARC-19(XA-3) that bears no resemblance to the picture of the Bell Labs 
model, even to having a separate transmitter and receiver, reversing the 
integration concept.  Go figure.... 

The CO-NAVAER 08-5Q-227 dated 15 September 1945 lists the following:

AN/ARC-12
AN/ARC-13
AN/ARC-19

The are also some SHF sets listed, but they all have the suffix "In 
Development" at the end of the description.

73,
Mike