Bill Horne wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:
And we will never see them on the commercial surplus market available
to hams, like the WW-II stuff was decades earlier.

It's a shame, but it's also easy to understand: the FCC was _very_ badly
burned by the Citizen's Band fiasco, and I'd bet other government
bureaucrats in and out of the military had that fresh in their minds as
Vietnam was winding down and the PRC-25's were filling up warehouses.

It's really more simple than that actually. At the end of World
War Two, every one thought, "Well, that's the end of that. There
will NEVER be another war now."

The military planners were looking at another 8 years of combat
in the Pacific and on the island of Japan to bring a conclusion
to World War Two. When the second atomic bomb was dropped, Japan
threw in the towel and quit.

With the rather sudden end of the war with Japan, that left stocks
for the planned additional 8 years of warfare with no place to use
it.

So there really was more "war surplus" stuff available at the end
of World War Two.

Most of the equipment used in Europe was left behind or just thrown
off of ships etc rather than bring it back. Or we would still be
seeing equipment for sale.

By the time Vietnam was over, the military, having found themselves
fighting an enemy that didn't have any problems using our own
equipment, they decided "No, that's not gonna happen again" and the
move towards "demilitarizing" equipment rather than just auctioning
it off by the pallet, or disposing it like the last time around.

Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi