[Milsurplus] Russ IL-14 aircraft w/ radios

[Hue Miller]

The BC-348 was not a Navy receiver but it was used by the Navy in their large planes,
PB4Y and PBY, replacing the RAX's before the ARR-15 came online. ( And actually, 
the BC-348 receiver is better in some ways than the ARR-15, whose only real feature
is the pre-settability).  The R-26M spot-tune ARC-5, according to a document on an
aviation website i recently posted, seems to have never gone beyond the testing
stage.
 
The late production of the US-9 receiver i account to the high cost of trying to build
an alternate universe from the ground up. This means building your own tubes, transistors,
ferrite antenna bars for transistor radios, plastic cabinets, etc. - much stuff the rest of
the West was already getting by trade, when not producing it themselves.  It is very 
difficult and costly to build an alternative universe, even with maximum borrowing and 
copying. You can see that even without a weapons race led by any particular politicians,
the race just to keep up in the rapidly evolving area of consumer products would have 
inevitably led to the system's collapse, and within a few years. That and the population's 
growing tired to death of eating political slogans and quixotic theories. 
 
So at the same time USSR was producing tube radios based on a 1936 design, non-nuclear
weapon equiped countries in the world were exporting inexpensive CB radios with
frequency synthesis. 
 
About the time the USSR was still producing US-9s, some US diplomat called the USSR
"Upper Volta with rockets". That says nothing about the long-suffering and hard-worked
people, just the overall economic output of the system. -Hue Miller 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/milsurplus/attachments/20080303/e980c493/attachment.htm