[Milsurplus] ATF Radio

[Hue Miller]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Spike Dennis" <spike.dennis at yahoo.com>
> The radio looks like a Radio Specialties Company product or one of
it's sister companies.
> Hue is correct. The USFS was using VHF/FM before ANYBODY else! They
pioneered this mode before WW-II & after the war built the very first
VHF/FM hand held transceiver(I have one). That said, there were still
SPF portable HF/AM radios in use into the mid 1960's.

-Well, i'm partial to FS NON-fm radios but i don't think any FS was
quite
so progressive. They used VHF from around late 1930s but it was AM.
Police departments pioneered FM. I don't think any Forest Service
picked up FM til there were more portable and affordable FM portables
on the market. That would be around when Motorola and Radio Specialties
and Hallicrafters and maybe some others put out lunch box size FM
radios.
I was going to question the SPF set use date, but then i thought better.
Maybe 3 Mc/s AM endured to the end of HF-AM in 1976. It was just a
few years later that George Babits started coming up with lots of SPFs
and a JT-350. I was offered locally a Morrow AM base station, which
i declined (big mistake).
BTW, was just looking at some advertising for a book "Silent Siege",
Bert Webber. Has a photo of a USCG beach patroller carrying a rifle
and on his back, the wooden box model "S" radiophone, 2 tube VHF.
Another thing that interested me was its use over several miles reach
by the travelling outstation setting up the wire antenna on a ridgeline.
That is mobile communications the hard way, setting up a wire antenna,
but at least at 33 Mc/s it was much easier than the 1/2 wave antenna
for 3.2 Mc/s with the SPF.  -Hue Miller