[Milsurplus] BC-224 in Aircraft

[Mike Morrow]

Marty wrote:

> Say all 'militarized' DC3s were 12V & had a 191 & a 224, right?

And initially, a SCR-*-183 command set, until the SCR-522 (12V) was
installed.

> What a horrible step backward fm the xtal'd / chanelized WECo gear
> they ran for civvy airlines... including the 233 140mc vhf

I think the AN/ARC-4 might have made a fairly decent set if the two
receiver front ends had an RF stage.  As designed, these must have
been pretty deaf even brand new.

Dave wrote:

>VHF was new to the military and, *according to the commanders on the
>scene,*  not me, was "not ready for prime time."  Spares not yet widely
>distributed, men not yet trained in repair of things as complex as an 
>ARC-1 or ARC-3 (or even the ARC-5 VHF). 

Some of that unpreparedness may have been due to the misappropriation of
efforts to the obviously obsolete (by mid-war) MF/HF command set concept.

The AN/ARC-1 and AN/ARC-3 appeared sufficiently late that VHF should
have been familiar to the pilots and technicians.  The USN's AN/ARC-1 is
far easier to tune on a channel than the VHF AN/ARC-5, and the USAAF's
AN/ARC-3 even more so, essentially being an "auto-tune after a crystal
is selected" system, compared to their tedious SCR-522-A.

The several pilot memoirs that I've read indicate without exception
pilot preference for the channelized VHF gear compared to "coffee
grinder" (their term) sets.  At least the AN/ARC-5 with its lock-tuned
transmitters *and* receivers was a laudable attempt to overcome one
of the usage problems of the MF/HF command set.

Only a fool would claim that VHF replaced all HF command set use in WWII.
But it is clear that the US military services entered WWII completely
dominated by the MF/HF command set concept, then emerged four short
years later with the VHF command set now the dominant technology and with
the USN researching the use of UHF.

>I have Radioman training records right here, and both of them show training
>in VHF radio as the last thing they did in 1945, just after training
>for the ART-13, and that just a short familiarization.

I think that results from the aircraft radioman NOT being the operator of
the VHF command set, and certainly not being the one who maintained and preset
the VHF gear.  There's really nothing in-flight that the USN radioman could
do to or for the various VHF sets used by the USN.  The situation would have
been better with an AN/ARC-3, still I doubt there was much in-flight adjustment
made to that set by its USAAF keepers.

The USN and USAAF both had maintenance organizations that performed all the VHF
set adjustments.

Mike / KK5F