Well, this has strayed way off the original post, and I do intend to
find the book and read it, but ... speaking from a little battle experience:
Fred (FL) wrote:
In a battle war situation - the last thing a
operator military person needs to have to do,
is dial in an exact frequency.
Tactical radios -- the ones that are in the heat of combat -- were
crystal controlled even in WW2. Other than those, in the US Vietnam
Adventure, we had a lot of KWM-2A's for HF [big knob to change freq and
our maint depot guys left the ham rocks in the bottom board and put our
military crystals in the top board. A lifesaver for me at HS1FJ],
AN/GRC-27's for Air to Ground stuff, and AN/TRC-24's for multi-channel
radio relay stuff, none rock-bound. The 27's were channelized, but you
could select the frequency for each channel [never really figured out
how Art Collins and his guys did that, but it involved a lot of motors,
gears, racks, and slugs :-) ], and everything else was selectable.
Synthesized controls showed up in the AN/TRC-96, but rocks were still
the staple for the AN/MRC-98 heavy mobile tropo. Now, it's all
satellite stuff.
Stability in WW2 was probably an issue, but passbands were wider then
too, and voice was AM ... non-exact tuning was tolerable. In the 60's
voice was SSB, tuning mattered, but then Art and his guys took care of
that for us. For the record, I think I have destroyed 22 operational
KWM2A's with thermite. We had two on every mission, we burned them up
at the end. Tough job for a ham.
73,
Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2007 CQP Oct 6-7
- www.cqp.org
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