[Milsurplus] 18M / TCH

[Hue Miller]

I didn't see if this one is tagged TCH, but that's what the Navy called it. 
I have manuals on it;
however the manuals are non-Navy nomenclatured; they are Collins manuals.
Around mid 1970s I bought one from a fellow in Edmonds, WA.  He was an 
engineer, living in
a large house above this lovely Puget Sound coast town, and had a great 
view. However it
seems he had recently been divorced, and was only him living in the large 
house, so it had
kind of an empty, not right vibe, and it didn't seem to me that his ham 
radio hobby was
filling up the loss. Anyway enuff of my take o that, which may have been 
offbase  anyway.
He had seen my ad, maybe even in the local "Little Nickel" paper. He had a 
TCH for, let's see,
$75, which was way bigger bucks then, than now. I'd never seen one before, 
so I asked him
where he got it. He said he had been at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard ( PSNS ) 
at Bremerton,
WA ( this is where the Missouri was before going to Hawaii - and there used 
to be an old
carrier parked there too, IIRC. ( I didn't really like the town, looked too 
buttoned down and
rain-lashed to me; I wondered if it would be a lonely drag to be stationed 
there during WW2
- but at least the service people could take the ferry into Seattle on leave 
time - a 45 minute
pretty scenic trip on a pleasant ferryboat ). He said the TCH were used in 
torpedo recovery
boats - similar to whaleboat - but that had been replaced by TCS. No date 
was specified
but I'd take an semi educated guess at 1941 or 1942. The old TCH radios? 
They were
taken into the electronics classes and taken apart by students, I suppose to 
acquaint them
with radio parts and construction. Somehow he'd made off with this example. 
( Bless those
souls who save instead of scrap or burn the "obsoleted" materials! )  This 
example he added
an AC supply to the rear outside of the unit - I gotta remove that.  I also 
received with it,
the metal box for the dynamotor unit, and a simple switched loading coil 
unit. The manual
indicates, IIR, a motor-generator, antenna poles, etc.
If you look in one of the Sig Corps catalogs, I think it's something like 
TM-11-286, something
like "Electronic Systems Engineering", there's about a 1/3 page list of 
"British Equipment".
In it you see listed an "18M", which of course is exceptional among the 
British nomenclature.
Looking thru an old Radio News magazine I was very surprised to see a photo, 
low-res, from
North Africa. In the corner of some ruin British soldiers were using what 
was clearly an 18M.
However, in reading the WS19 list from the U.K., I have never, I don't 
think, seen any mention
of anyone there owning one or even having seen one.
Since that acquisition the only one I had heard of was one advertised in ER 
maybe 15 years
ago for $150. I was too late.
Edmonds, Washington is a pretty interesting, upscale, scenic, and 
interesting little place.
My sister and I had occasion to walk around it after arranging with a 
funeral home there
our parents' funerals in the last couple years. There a lots of interesting 
shops and great
affordable and fun restaurants, especially down at the waterfront, where 
there is a yacht
harbor and ferry terminal. When I was I in high school out there eons ago, 
there was a
folk legend that part of the movie "On The Beach" had been filmed there, but 
of course that
was pure myth.
-Hue Miller