On Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:18:19 -0600, Richard
wrote:

On 3/9/2012 4:58 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 9 Mar 2012 17:54:51 -0500, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Jim wrote in message
...
"Such receivers were not remotely tuned by the pilot, but were
instead
lock-tuned to the associated transmitter's frequency before
take-off."


http://aafradio.org/
"It seems that WWII pilots were notorious for having little patience
with their gadgets, and temporary loss of signal due to fading or the
like was often met with attempts at retuning the radio, usually ending
up off the assigned frequency. There were times when this loss of
communications led to tragic results. To counter this temptation, ARC
added temperature compensation and stabilized the local oscillator on
the R-25, R-26, and R-27 HF sets, so that once tuned to a particular
frequency by a ground technician it could be locked in place until the
next mission."

They should have stuck with crystals. I had an ARC 5 in 1960, which
had been converted to xtal control by another ham. It had five crystal
sockets and a switchbox. That would have solved their tuning problems.


There was a strong mind-set go run what-ya-brung during that war.
And, to a certain point, rightfully so.

Production was the key to victory.
Not messing around trying to make better toys.

Okay, but consider this: My dad was a radio man in the Marines,
directing and spotting artillery fire at Guadalcanal, and the rest of
the islands the Marines invaded in the South Pacific.

One of his rigs for communication with ships was an FM/AM/CW
transmitter/receiver built by National, which mounted on the back of
his Jeep. The thing my dad remembered most about it was that the
entire interior of the cabinet was silver-plated.

Gilding the lilly, obviously. And he had both crystal and tunable
rigs, BTW. In fact, the crystals I had when I got my first ham ticket,
in 1959, were Texas Instruments and US Crystals reground from surplus
WWII military crystals. If you peeled off the stickers, the etched
information on the crystal covers was all millitary. My dad recognized
them and the frequencies.

--
Ed Huntress


Or even improving the toys we had.
(other than a couple of spectacular exceptions)

That's part and parcel of how the Germans and English passed us at jet
speed by the end of the war.

But we probably wouldn't have won it any other way.