On May 3, 9:00�am, John from Detroit wrote:
N2EY wrote:
I think the main point is that how "good" or "advanced" a rig is
depends in large part on the application, and judging military
radio stuff by amateur standards - or the reverse - is
an apples-and-oranges thing.

I think, here, we are starting to reach the same page,
we may be viewing
it differently but we are, at least, viewing the same page.

I agree, Ruggedness (Continuing to work
under adverse conditions) beats
"Advanced" in many cases and generally in most
all military cases.

And not just military cases.

Fiction story: IN a Star Trek book some rick kid is
putting down the
comm gear on the Enterprise till Uhura explains
why the older clunkier
and easier to fix hardware beats the heck out of
his little one chip
hyper-intergrated circuit radio. �(Of course she's
fixing it at the time)

As Scotty used to say, the more complicated you make the plumbing, the
easier it is to stop up the drain.

Fact.. That is very true. something that can
be "Field fixed" is better
than a "Toss it in the trash and break out a new one"
epically if you
have a parts store but no complete new box

Yes and no. In some situations the time and resources it takes to fix
something is more than the resource-cost to have a spare new box.

Again, it all depends on the situation. And on what we consider
"fixable" and "a component".

For example, for about 10 years I've been assembling my own PCs from
pieces of old ones. (The machine this was written on was built just
that way). I've also fixed many PCs with hardware problems using parts
from the boneyard.

But in practically all repair and assembly situations involving PCs,
the "components" are drives, motherboards, memory sticks, video cards,
etc. Such components aren't usually repaired if they fail, they are
simply replaced, because the replacements are available and
inexpensive (often free).

For example, the R-390 and R-390A were
designed way back in the early
1950s, and one of the requirements
was a digital frequency readout. A
lot of mechanical complexity went into
producing a system where you
could just look at one set of numbers
and know exactly (well, within a
couple of hundred Hz) where the receiver was
tuned. No interpretation
needed. Such a feature would not appear
in manufactured ham rigs until
the 1960s (National NCX-5) and wouldn't
become common in ham rigs
until the 1980s.

I recall some digital readout hardware much earlier..

Can you give some examples in radio equipment?

But then,,, When
you think about it. after WWII many hams used
government surplus
hardware. �So the Military stuff, �BECAME the ham stuff..
Alas, modern
military rules kind of make that hard to do since they
"De-militarize"
so much stuff.

I still have working WW2 surplus radio stuff. Like my $2
BC-342-N, built by Farnsworth Radio and Television...

The reason hams used surplus stuff was that it was inexpensive.
The reason it was inexpensive was the sudden end to WW2 in
late summer 1945.

Military hardware of all kinds was being manufactured and
stockpiled in great quantities for the invasion of Japan. When
the war ended suddenly, those stockpiles became surplus.

Note that much of that surplus required modification to be useful
to hams. Some of it was only really useful if torn down for the parts.

Those mods don't mean the original design was faulty. They
simply mean the application was different. For example, my
BC-342-N had its sensitivity improved by changing the values
of the cathode and screen resistors of the RF and IF stages. The
original design used different values because they were more
concerned with dynamic range than sensitivity.

Or consider the R-1051 receivers, which used a
row of knobs to set
each digit of the frequency, rather than a single
large knob. That
kind of frequency control became common in military
HF sets but not in
ham gear, because the operating environments are so different.

Gee... I have a 2-meter rig in my
motor home (Currently set to 146.52)
that is 30 years old and which you set
the frequency by a row of dials
(Knobs turned sideways) just like you describe.
�It's 100% ham.

And I have a 1977 vintage HW-2036 2 meter rig that is similar.

But they are not HF rigs; they're 2 meter FM rigs. The R-1051 family
are HF receivers, and date from the early 1960s.

The point is that the military application required a receiver that
could be set to a known frequency with great accuracy, not the
ability to smoothly tune through the spectrum looking for signals.

The
Wilson WE-800 Revision 3 (3rd production run) and I might add, it had o
perated from -40 to well over 120 degrees. F

You've got me beat there!

The coldest I've ever personally experienced was -36 degrees F. (Yes I
was outside working in it).

The hottest was about 110 degrees F

73 de Jim, N2EY