On May 8, 4:03�pm, Jeffrey D Angus wrote:
Bill Horne wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:

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.

I'm interested in more detail about how different people see "the
Citizen's Band fiasco.

IMHO, what happened was that FCC created UHF CB in 1948, and it went
OK except that its popularity was limited. This was because, in those
days, the good UHF equipment cost too much and the inexpensive UHF
equipment had pretty dismal performance.

So in 1958, FCC created 27 MHz CB, with the idea that the
equipment would be simpler and less expensive, while still giving
adequate performance for the intended uses. And it worked - for a
while.

But what FCC never counted on was that large numbers of people would
buy CB sets and simply ignore the regulations for CB. FCC could not
begin to adequately enforce the rules once the CB culture had become
one of simply ignoring them.

How do others see it?

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."

Well, the WW2 veterans I have known didn't think that way. But that's
really a minor thing.

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.

Do you have a source for the 8 years figure? From what I have read,
and veterans' accounts, the invasion of Japan was expected to take a
year or so, with enormous casualties on both sides.

But as you said, the atomic bomb, plus continued conventional bombing
and the near-blockade by USN submarines, made all that pretty
academic.

One WW2 veteran I knew well, who was in 7th Air Force B-24s, had 13
missions to Japan when the war ended. It took 40 missions to get
rotated home, and he said that even in mid-1945 the chances were 1 in
3 a B-24 crew would not survive 40 missions.

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.

Agreed, whether it was for 1 year or 8 years. Plus a lot of stuff was
being made for Lend-Lease.

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.

I don't know if that's really true. From the veterans I have known
some stuff was left behind, of course, because occupation troops still
needed some things. But after May 1945, usable stuff from the European
and other theatres was shipped back to the US for use in the invasion
of Japan.

When the war ended suddenly, there whole supply chain was full of
stuff in all stages of completion.

Remember that while the war ended in 1945, we were still seeing WW2
surplus for sale 25+ *years* later.

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.

Yep - but there's more to the story.

WW2 required enormous quantities of equipment, and American industry
was almost totally dedicated to war production. For just one example,
almost 20,000 B-24 bombers of various suffixes were produced in less
than 5 years, which means 20,000 complete radio sets plus spares for
them. And that's just one kind of airplane!

Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts were simply not on that scale.

In addition, much of the hardware produced for WW2 was essentially
obsolete when the war ended. Piston-engine propeller fighter aircraft
were already being replaced by the first-generation jets by 1945, for
example. The use of HF for short-range radio was being replaced by
VHF. Radar had gone through several generations during the war; in
1941 a 112 MHz radar was state-of-the-art, while in 1945 there were 10
GHz sets in mass production.

So there was a lot of old stuff in warehouses and in the supply chain
to be disposed of.

Perhaps the biggest factor is simply this: A lot of WW2 surplus gear
was easily adapted to ham use. A BC-342 receiver, for example, could
be easily adapted for use in the ham shack. While it might not have
been state-of-the-art even in 1946, it was a dern good ham rx for
$50-70.

But later surplus, when we hams could get it, wasn't so easily used as
ham gear. And it wasn't nearly so inexpensive.



73 de Jim, N2EY