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

N2EY wrote:
WA8YXM said:
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


Well, I clipped a lot: You ask for examples of earlier digital readout
(pre-1980) stiff, and then agreed that many hams used Surplus Military
hardware.. Likely the digital stuff I saw was ex-military. It has been
like 40 years since I saw it so I can't recall much.

Now,, the -40.. I had parking lot detail at a swap fest
The 120+ was the temp recorded inside a car. facing NORTH, in Michigan,
IN JANUARY of all months. Imagine what it hit in August?

The only time the radio did not work properly was when the battery
voltage went low. Then it would would not receive properly till the
voltage came up a bit.

On May 4, 9:35�am, John from Detroit wrote:
You ask for examples of earlier digital readout
(pre-1980) stiff, and then agreed that many hams
used Surplus Military
hardware..

The discussion was about amateur gear being "more advanced" than
military radios. I gave the example of the mechanical digital
dial on the R-390 and R-390A receivers, which were designed in the
very early 1950s. (IIRC, the ARR-2 receiver was even older). Similar
mechanical-digital dials didn't appear in manufactured amateur gear
until the 1960s (the NCX-5) and didn't become common in amateur
equipment until the late 1970s.

The bigger point is that those who set the requirements decided, way
back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that the complexity and
expense of a frequency readout such as used on the R-390 was justified
for a military HF receiver.

Likely the digital stuff I saw was ex-military.

Of course - which proves what I was saying: that the applications are
very different.

It must be remembered that the resouirces available are very different
as well. For example, cost isn't usually as big a factor in military
radio equipment as it is in amateur radio equipment. A receiver like
the R-390A, when new in the 1950s, cost the taxpayers a couple of
thousand dollars (it varied with the contract). The most expensive
amateur receiver of the time, the Collins 75A-4, cost about 20-25% of
that. Not many hams could afford a new 75A-4 in its day; even fewer
could afford an R-390.

Was the 75A-4 "more advanced"? In some ways, yes - it has passband
tuning, a product detector and notch filter, all of which the R-390
family lack. The mechanical filters in the 75A-4 are more suited to
amateur operation as well. OTOH the 75A4 has an "analog" dial despite
using a PTO, and is not general-coverage.

Different job, different resources, different tool.

Of course the radio amateurs of most countries have the option of
homebrewing their own rigs, which can be a real cost-saver. (See my
QRZ.com bio for a current example, and the K5BCQ HBR website for an
earlier example.)

73 de Jim, N2EY