[Milsurplus] RMCA LF Regen AR-8503

[Hubert Miller]

My submission here won’t add much to the topic, but….
The elementary stats course, the instructor recounting the anecdote said that the Allies learned useful facts from the serial numbers on tanks.
I don’t know; i reserve opinion, but i tend to think, how much of an advantage was this ?

I have an RMCA AR-8501 mid-1930s ship receiver. The seller told me that RMCA in those years, leased the receiver and then user was locked into
a legal agreement. I don’t know. I would expect this situation would have been ended by the exigencies of the world war.  This exclusivity, it seems
to me, just would not work with the numbers and dispersion of cargo ships.
-Hue Miller

On Behalf Of Brenda Gentry via Milsurplus
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2026 10:44 AM
To: milsurplus
Subject: Re: [Milsurplus] RMCA LF Regen AR-8503


When one is dealing with commercial  marine radios used by companies that also were marine communications companies, legal things can be weird and very nasty. In those times, the ship owner leased the equipment and often the operator(s)  from a communications company. They had unbelievable restrictions on which replacement parts, like tubes, could be used in the equipment. I believe all of this has been eliminated  since then, but in the mid 20th century they were still in force.  If you look at an old vacuum tube, such as a 1940s RCA, the tube is often labeled "Licensed only to the extent listed on carton".  Plugging that tube into a commercial marine radio could trigger nasty legal actions from the communications company. You were required to buy and use the exact same 6SK7 from RCA Radiomarine at 5 times the price. Similar edicts applied to some sound systems in theaters and  network radio stations. Most of these were declared illegal in the late 1930s, but some remained into the early 1950s.  When  RMCA sold equipment to the military, they wanted to keep anyone from using it on a commercial ship after the war so they forced the military to mutilate the serial number.

     Brenda Gentry, KA2IVY
On 8/3/26 12:51 PM, Ken Kinderman via Milsurplus wrote:
I can undersand obscuring the nameplate to hide production info, but after the war?

Ken
W2EWL

On Sun, Aug 2, 2026 at 4:01 PM Hubert Miller via Milsurplus <milsurplus at mailman.qth.net<mailto:milsurplus at mailman.qth.net>> wrote:
I have some RU GF equipment that has the SN defaced by using a small drill bit on the individual numbers. I had a statistics class decades ago and the instructor said the Allies in WW2 got some worthwhile idea of German AFV production by analyzing nameplates. I thought "Wow, interesting" at the time but now i think it was just BS to inject an interesting item to the class. I do not think there's any actionable info in some German nameplate or for that matter, RUGF equipment. If you have seen any 'clandestine' equipment you quickly see that the SNs have some unknown number offset and are totally bogus for any useful info.
-Hue Miller

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