[Milsurplus] BC-611 Fundamentally Flawed

[John Hutchins]

All -
Could it be that the grunt on the ground was thought to be a bit more 
chatty than the pilots in the air?  The thought fo coordinating 
Air/Ground support at the squad level was most likely poo-poo'ed.  Mot 
likely had to be relayed up the chain to regimental HQ?
Hutch

Mike Morrow wrote:
> Hue wrote:
>
>   
>> You do not have much interoperability with armor. How many armored assault
>> vehicles carried HF equipment?
>>     
>
> Well, there's the SCR-508!  (20 to 28 MHz)  :-)
> I couldn't resist that.  There must have been some great (and surprising)
> DX on those sets when the solar activity was good!
>
>   
>> Maybe the 300 set should have been built to tune a lower
>> frequency range?
>>     
>
> That to me has always been one of the most interesting questions.
> Why produce a BC-1000, a set that was very sophisticated for its era,
> whose 40 to 48 MHz coverage did not overlap any spectrum covered by
> any other tactical FM radio of the time?  As Robert mentioned yesterday,
> that gap persisted until the RT-67/GRC appeared in 1949.  
>
> It would have been as easy to make a version covering, say, 27 to
> 35 MHz to overlap other sets such as the SCR-508 and SCR-608.
> I can only guess that frequency congestion was a persistent problem,
> and that the SCR-300 was the initial entry into that old philosophy
> of assigning three separate frequency ranges to the major components
> of the army:  20 to 28 MHz to Armor, 27 to 39 MHz to Artillery, and
> 38 to 55 MHz to Infantry.
>
>   
>> The BC-611 COULD have been built to tune 30 Mc/s without too
>> much trouble, using overtone crystals.  Of course, to pack an FM
>> radio, at that time, into such a package was impossible, or at least,
>> VERY difficult and expensive.
>>     
>
> That arrived as the 1951 RT-196/PRC-6, which only barely saw any
> service in the Korean War.  The RT-196 contains 14 vacuum tubes on
> a chassis that occupies only about 35 percent of the volume inside
> the handset (the rest is battery space).  Though unjustfiably
> disdained today (like all the rest of the so-called Korean War
> series of tactical radios), it was a marvel of miniaturization.
>
> The same could be said for the BC-611 in 1941.  Imagine, a one-third
> watt plate-modulated MOPA transmitter, a superheterodyne receiver with
> RF stage, using only five tubes in a small handset that also contains
> all batteries.  For something designed in 1940, that is still pretty
> impressive engineering.  Now, if only it wasn't so hard to align.
>
> Mike / KK5F
> ______________________________________________________________
> Milsurplus mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/milsurplus
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:Milsurplus at mailman.qth.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
>