[Milsurplus] BC-645 & my memories of G&G

[Jack Sullivan]

 I was born in late 1944 while my ham father was overseas in China with the OSS, helping to run a clandestine radio station in Kunming. I grew up in a big house belonging to my grandmother. My father (W2INF) had his ham shack in the attic while the basement was filled with Command sets, big TN tuning units, etc. I spent a lot of time in that basement & still love the smell of MFP.
In the late 1950s-early 1960s my father worked in NYC & during the summer I would go in with him to explore NYC. I fell in love with G&G & spent many hours there. Mr. Baum gave me a tour of his warehouse upstairs & showed me earphones from WW1!
I still recall the stuff I bought from G&G: an APX-6, an APR-4 (+ tuning unit) & a Korean-war vintage panadaptor, an IP-69A/ALA-2. How I got this stuff back to Grand Central from Vesey St is a mystery to me yet. I was saddened when they told me that it all was going to disappear to make way for the World Trade Center.
Regarding the BC-645, the following statement  is not correct: 'the story with the 645s was they were never fielded in ww2 due to incompatibility with existing IFF sets.' The 645s were not deployed in the ETO for 2 reasons: they were too big to fit in Spitfires or Hurricanes & their 400 MHz output frequency was too close to the receive frequency of German radars. They were deployed in the Pacific where the Japanese radars only received up to the 200 MHz region. You can occasionally see a used 645 pop up on eBay.
Jack
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