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

[J. Forster]

> 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.

Hue, there were only really two, the Mk II and Mk III, built in any
quantity. AFAIK, only the Mk II sets were built in the US, and many
apperantly never made it out of the crates onto a ship.

> 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.

There was a lot of stuff like that in the US. You simply cannot order and
produce "just enough" stuff to fight a war. You have to go balls to the
wall, until the war is over, win or lose.

> 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.

Err...  we won the war. Our cities and factories were not bombed. The
Germans didn't come through like Sherman.

YMMV,

-John

=============

> 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
>
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