[Milsurplus] Tank (radio) vs. Tank (radio)

[Hue Miller]

Regarding Rossians, I don't believe it's a case of they just weren't into
radios in their tanks, more like they didn't have an adequate supply.
Something that puzzles me still, and I have not managed to get to the
bottom of it, is that despite vast numbers of the various Marks of No.19
sets built, you very rarely, or maybe never, see them in Russia, altho
many different sets of USA manufacture turned up there. More variety,
in fact, than you'd ever expect, such as a complete TBW set, for example.

With German AFV radios, the thing to remember is that most were designed
in the area of 1937-1938, and then the designs were fixed for the duration.
The specs I have seen don't seem to me to boast very good distance, I
suppose due to the RF tubes used, mostly circuits with such as the tube
RV12P2000, more or less a 12SK7 equivalent, used in the much remarked
upon German-Italian design way, of using only the same tube throughout
the receiver.
Another interesting sidelight, I think, is the German substitution of low
grade pot metal alloy starting in 1943, for their mobile vehicle radios,
to conserve better metals for aircraft use. The later pot metal radio
can weigh twice as much as the earlier same model, and if not stored
at above a certain temperature threshold, the pot metal is subject to
breakdown and crumbling. You sometimes see really nice looking
German vehicle radios which came off the assembly line in 1945,
heavy pot metal radios which as they came off the production line,
were destined to have no purpose and go nowhere.

Something else that puzzles me is how inadequate many, maybe most,
German manuals were. Many USA manuals for civilian type hobbyist shortwave
radios, like some humble Hallicrafters, were vastly superior, in my opinion, 
with
photos and voltage and resistance tables the old-school German manuals lack.
I suppose the gothic-looking old German Fraktur typeface used for most of 
the
war enhances the "experience"; this typeface being used until some Nazi
bigwig, maybe even Hitler, decided it was backward and a hindrance to 
progress,
and the conventional modern font was adopted instead.
I have seen around 20 German manuals, and only one struck me as a wow
experience. That was the manual for the aircraft series FuG-X, also
written as FuG10, Funkgeraet -10 = Radio Set 10, which looked to me
as thorough and wonderful as our AN/ARC-5 manual. ( The set was roughly
equivalent also to our SCR-274N / ARC-5, except that it covered both liaison
and command, for most of the war, longer distance working, when rarely
required, being accomplished by sets modified to work above their
normal 6 MHz top end. Caveat: I believe. Subject to correction.  )

Among Japanese armor comms, I know that US directories list some
Japanese radios as being for tank use, but if you have seen how small
the Japanese "tankettes" were ( not my term, an actual historical US
term for them ), you would also wonder how any radio larger than the
one-tube walkie-talkie wonders would fit. Perhaps only a "command
tank" was wireless equipped?

Something else to remember, while enjoying accounts of episodic US jamming
successes, is that most of the grinding infantry and tank battle war, took 
place
on the East Front. Imagine a tank battle mixing up hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of tanks; or of not just one D-Day, but several, as Russians forced
crossings of various rivers.
-Hue Miller