[Milsurplus] Operation Market Garden

[Bob Camp]

Hi

I saw the same show. Like a lot of this stuff on TV they spend a lot of 
time with cute video clips and not a lot of time providing the 
information you would love to have. A few observations:

I suspect the guys doing the communicating were Dutch ham's. The one 
shot of a frequency readout that I could see was inside the 160 meter 
ham band.

The 68 came in several versions. It was totally unclear which version 
was being used. If the frequency was inside 160 meters then it would 
have to be the low frequency version.

 From all the yack on the show about "clear field range" I would have 
thought they were talking about VHF gear. In general 160 meter stuff 
isn't quite as impacted by obstructions.  That said 1/4 watt isn't 
enough to reasonably go 10 or 15 miles with a short antenna. Anything 
you can carry on your back is a short antenna at 2 MHz ...

The 68's they showed were the battery powered version. If that is 
representative of what was really used then there's another issue. 
Having run low power battery powered tube gear I can speak to this 
directly. The power you get on a brand new set of batteries is maybe 
30% higher than what you get after the battery has been used for a few 
minutes. The 1/4 watt probably was down to half of that after a few 
hours of use ...

Be interesting to see if anybody on the list has any real data.

	Take Care!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ



On Nov 13, 2004, at 3:50 PM, Jack Antonio wrote:

> Hi all
>
> Last night the History Channel had
> a program about operation Market
> Garden, and the reasons for the
> operations failure.
>
> One of the reasons listed was
> the failure of the communications
> equipment, and they recreated the
> communications by using what they
> called a 68 set, a backpack portable
> in communciation with a base set, which
> was not identified but looked like a 19
> set.
>
> Their conclusion was that the radios
> simply lacked the range to be effective.
>
> But wasn't there more to it than that?
>
> Wasn't there some problem in wrong channels
> being supplied, or incompatible equipment
> being used?
>
>
>
> Jack Antonio WA7DIA
> scr287 at sbcglobal.net
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