[Milsurplus] ARB

[MillerKE6F at aol.com]

Hi Dave,
 
    There is certainly room at the table for those who  want to restore the 
artifacts of WWII and other incarnations of military  materiel.  I support 
both sides of the table on this count.  But  please do not discount the hams 
who used this stuff as a means to an end when  the marketplace was 
literally overflowing with this gear.  To discount that  history is certainly not in 
keeping with the spirit of the technology past and  the clever use of the 
gear in it's afterlife.  I think it was far better to  have the hams gather 
up this stuff in years following WWII than to have it  shredded into material 
for beer cans and aluminum siding.  And that is  context from which I refer 
to as the Ham's contribution to the preservation of  the equipment.
 
    And to have a list member dismiss the  adaptations that the hams made 
of this equipment is somewhat short sighted and  comes off as being rather 
smug at best.   I can't argue that a lot of  the gear that was produced for 
the war effort  was clever, however, I can  also assert that some of the stuff 
was pure junk and the product of getting war  materiel out the door as 
quickly as possible to take the battle to the axis  powers.  Much of the 
equipment that went into this heroic effort was  certainly dated and lacked the 
engineering and procurement oversight we see  in equipment that came to the 
fore in the late 40s.  
 
    But let's not get another tempest in a teapot going  on this topic as 
it's been raked over the coals many times with neither side  willing to give 
an inch.  However, lets all try to be less pompous about  the topic and give 
to those hams who were and remain the real preservers of the  cited 
equipment's history be it by design or simple luck.  I've never  heard a ham fault 
those who want to preserve these artifacts as military  history, but I do 
bristle when I read drivel about how hams are the "Destroyers  of Hallowed 
Equipment."
 
    73
 
    Bob, KE6F