On May 1, 1:43�pm, John from Detroit wrote:
K�HB wrote:

Better in what way?

Better in that it's more advanced..

At the risk of echoing K0HB: More advanced in what way?

Several years ago (about 30) I was
chatting with a ham who had just finished his hitch in the military, He
commented on being ask to check out some equeptment
since he was a
certified electronics tech both in civilian life and military life.

At the time they were still using HT-200's (I
do admit the 200 is more solid (durable) than the 220)

Is an HT-220 really that much more advanced than an HT-200?

I watched his dad bounce a 200 off the pavement.
.....
The radio continued to work.

In a lot of situations - and not just military ones - that it
continued to work is a lot more important than how advanced the radio
is.

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.

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.

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.

The T2FD resistively-loaded antenna is another example.

the amplifier or transmistter was a common Ham
unit with a new paint job and military style knobs.

Several pieces of gear, Henry, Collins, Drake and more,
came in civilian and military versions. The only difference
was the olive drab paint and the military style knobs and
an "A" for Army (or some other designator
to indicate the cosmetic differences)

As recently as Viet Nam they were still using ham gear
in the Military. Good Solid KWM-2's in fact

In some roles, yes. But not in all roles. I suspect that the use
of ham gear in military applications came about only when nothing else
was available at the time.

Remember too that a lot of ham gear and components (such as the PTOs
developed by Collins) were originally developed for military
applications and then used for ham stuff.

Plus US military involvement in Viet Nam ended at least 35 years
ago. A lot has changed since then.

73 de Jim, N2EY