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Old 9th Dec 2020, 1:12 pm   #81
Lucien Nunes
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

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At the end of the day there's enough people fascinated in old electronic technology to safeguard it's future.
Although for some technologies, the people are interested but no examples of the equipment are known to survive. Or, some might exist now, but without any means for the interested people to locate or obtain them, so they are doomed to be scrapped. This is much more a problem with industrial electronics than domestic, because of the lack of awareness, lack of examples hidden away in lofts, and logistical challenge of recovery from industrial premises.

For example; valve-based photo-electric smoke detectors. I've seen three scrapped in the last few years, but in each case there was no negotiable route to get hold of them. I got close with one, but somebody flagged up that it had not yet been tested for the presence of asbestos. I offered to have it inspected and tested before removal but they were contractually obliged to use a particular testing company on that site, and by the time the contractor did all the testing, I no longer had access. I wrote my contact details on it offering a reward for its safekeeping but heard nothing. Once proven asbestos-free it was evidently smashed off the wall with a sledgehammer, because half the back of the casing is still on the wall today.

For vintage technology of any sort to survive, there needs to be a constructive convergence of material, minds and resources. Each time one of those experiences a shortage, the ratchet wheel clicks round another tooth towards ancient history.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 1:15 pm   #82
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

I think the "things you had - or wished you'd had - in your childhood" aspect will always play a part here: it's just that as time moves on the 'things' get newer - hence the interest in retro-gaming, early home-computers etc.

Also, the "I couldn't afford one of those when I was young but I can now" effect.

Of course these effects will be different for other people: I don't really get excited about wooden/bakelite-cased broadcast-radios/TVs but metal-cased communications-receivers I find attractive: buses and trains fascinate some people but stir no emotions in me. Aircraft do though!

Other people will focus on style - kit by a particular designer, for example. I've always been intrigued by the 'inspired functionality' of the work of Tom Karen [who designed the Bush TR130, various Reliant cars, the Raleigh Chopper bike] - however Bang&Olufsen's stuff leaves me utterly unmoved.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 4:04 pm   #83
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

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Originally Posted by Cobaltblue View Post
Siemens didn't have a traffic division in the UK until 1989 when it became Siemens Plessey Controls.

The Siemens Traffic division prior to that was based in Munich.

Was he based overseas? or was it Plessey Traffic controls he worked for?

Cheers

Mike T
Ok, so I've spoken to him,

In 1975 he worked for Siemens based at the Central London Traffic Control Centre in New Scotland Yard. His training was in Frankfurt at the main Siemens plant/offices.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 4:38 pm   #84
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

The big problem with long term preservation of what we call 'modern' vintage electronics is simply keeping them going. For me a collection of dead boxes is pointless and boring but this of course is my personal opinion.

Something that was not expected is the failure of semi conductor devices. No matter how well stored it appears that dampness creeps along the connecting leadouts of transistors and ICs by capillary action rather like a splash of water between sheets of flat glass.

The failure of what appears on sight to be hermitically sealed Mullard transistors such as the lock fit range, breaking down in huge numbers now they are over 60 years old. ICs suffer the same failure and unlike valves they are difficult to source as replacements. Some ICs became obsolete during production causing the manufacturers real headaches!

The actual individual transistors may not be such a problem as there are so many similar types that will service as working replacements but the multi layered boards and modern construction are not good news for future enthusiasts of yesteryear electronics.

Of course all of this is irrelevant to a large degree due to the complete lack of interest by the younger generation to anything more than six months old.
You only have to see guys queuing up all night in order to purchase the latest phone or games box.

The only thing I queued up for when I was a young lad was the jumble sale and the 9" TV receivers waiting inside. Now that was exciting! Regards, John.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 4:55 pm   #85
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

The unknown in that, John, is if today's 'younger generation' will maintain the same attitude in later life. I'm fifty and can remember when everybody at school wanted the latest LCD watches with 'melody alarms' and the like. I'd bet that most of them would now prefer an old-fashioned mechanical Rolex, or similar, if they had the means. As I said earlier if they do want the old 1980s watches for nostalgic reasons they'll have far more trouble getting one fixed than they would one from the 1880s.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 5:02 pm   #86
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

Not just transistors: many first-generation LCDs are succumbing to the 'black death' - see 1970s RACAL receivers or car radios as an example. Not easy to substitute when there's things like bar-graphs or text included as well as just digits.

Same goes for VFDs - they were often customised and I doubt Futaba are still in the business. Even some of the 'bubble' LEDs used in first-generation calculators/testgear are not immune to losing the occasional segment after 50 years.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 5:51 pm   #87
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

By keeping vintage things in working order one is preserving what they did, as a separate entity from what they were. Recognising that there will come a time when they cannot be kept working any longer, there is some merit in capturing as carefully as possible a record them in operation for the benefit of others in the future. Whether as video demos, interactive emulators or whatever, we now have the means to conserve that 'essence' of a working thing beyond its own lifespan.

In contrast, Stephenson's 'Rocket' survives, but no-one would seriously contemplate running it. We could build a replica but many aspects of its operation would come from our perspective now, not that of the people who ran it at Rainhill. How cool would it be to have a film of the trials showing it in its original form steaming down the track, but no technology existed then to preserve the 'essence' of that pioneering effort.

The combination of a genuine example of an exhibit to study, and a well-executed demonstration of it working that can be archived with it, go quite a way to making up for the lack of perpetual functionality.
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Old 9th Dec 2020, 7:01 pm   #88
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In contrast, Stephenson's 'Rocket' survives, but no-one would seriously contemplate running it. We could build a replica but many aspects of its operation would come from our perspective now, not that of the people who ran it at Rainhill.
There is a vintage locomotive at Beamish apparently dating back the 1820s, which was recreated entirely from a painting of it - that's all. Here's a photo of it:
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In the same vein, I was involved a few years back with the attempted recreation of the GEE Mk.I system. This is, in my view, a very important bit of UK's electronics history, because a) it was the first hyperbolic radio navigation system to go into operation anywhere in the world (i.e. its a "world first" for UK, but virtually unknown), and b) its not just a prototype for the well known GEE Mk.II (which is all nearly everyone who has GEE, actually has) - GEE Mk.I was actually flown in anger during WWII, and the Germans were delighted to capture a set and start using it!

As far as it is known there isn't a single example of GEE Mk.I surviving, except for one R1324 receiver unit. That looks like this:
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That used to be owned by Norman Groom and is now reportedly with the Duxford Radio Society or the IWM (now they are two distinct bodies, I'm not sure which one of the two actually has it).

The other notable part of the system - the Indicator Unit Type 60 - has been entirely lost, as far as we were able to establish. However the project team I was part of managed to turn up a rather fuzzy photo of one which had been captured by the Germans:
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As far as we know this is the only photo that now exists of the first GEE system (despite referring to "R1355" in the text, which is a mistake by the German author!). We took that photo, and using the known size of components, like the Muirhead dial and the CRT, we managed to produce a scale drawing, and then turn it back into some real hardware:

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That's as far as it got, because a) we could not find the GEE Mk.I manual (ref SD.0208) which would provide a schematic and more details of the parts list and layout, and b) the project team fell apart in recent years, and the whole project got shelved. Not sure where that GEE Mk.I indicator is now - all I have now is photos and the odd drawing found at Kew national archives.

I share all this because I think its possible to identify "critical moments" in electronics history, where a breakthrough was made, and then either find (and save) the resulting hardware, or recreate it as has been attempted in the above example.

Another good example of this kind of approach is the Colossus rebuild at The National Museum of Computing. Fantastic job - as are the Bombes!


Richard
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Old 10th Dec 2020, 12:39 pm   #89
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

Sometimes, when a breakthrough was made, no-one even knew it at the time, it only became clear after the fact. During WWII, preservation of its history wasn't at the front of anyone's mind. People were fighting for survival, yet great things were happening quietly in the background, not just on battlefields.

I'm interested in the things that were at the vertex of changes in direction of technologies. I'm interested in things that were the best in their class. I'm somewhat less interested in things that were abject flops - sometimes after massive hype. I'm interested in things I can learn from. I'm definitely not interested in me-too products.

I don't feel a need to build an R1155/T1154 setup. To me it's important that there are some around so that anyone interested can get to see one, but I don't need one personally.

If oldness is goodness without any qualification, then older must be better. So tear down that listed building and restore the iron age site it was built over... no... restore the prehistoric forest... um, the primeval swamp.

Silly? Yes, but where do you stop? I think we all have our own reasons for being interested in older stuff. These are personal reasons and logic need not be involved.

I mess with it because it's fun and because I'm exploring. I think I may be just a big kid!

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Old 10th Dec 2020, 9:04 pm   #90
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I'm interested in the things that were at the vertex of changes in direction of technologies. I'm interested in things that were the best in their class.
David,

I couldn't agree more. Indeed I have devised ways (in the past) of evaluating electronic products to try and rate them as "worth saving". Here's my list of things to consider in that regard:
  • Operational significance. If military, did it play a significant role in some conflict? If commercial, did it sell in large volumes and get widely used, perhaps changing the way people lived or worked?
  • Innovation. Does it demonstrate some technical breakthrough, or early use of a new idea or technology? Or even more than one? Occasionally a whole new concept in system design emerges – like radar for instance.
  • Performance and fitness for purpose. Does the equipment do what its users needed it to do? Does it demonstrate outstanding performance for its time?
  • Quality of design and construction. Are high quality components used? Is it easy to maintain and repair?

These things are not easy to assess - they take considerable time, and effort to research now long forgotten and often obscure history.

I agree with you that equipment like the T1154/R1155 is not something that will score highly on the above scheme. It rates around zero for innovation for instance. As does the WS19! (One of my pet hates - even though I have owned them, used them, demonstrated them and so on).

Many people acquire historic equipment not because its worthy of saving - but rather because its available. Its old, and someone is offering it for a tenner - so its bought and brought home. And what actually gets saved in both museums and private collections is largely determined by what can be found to put in those collections. Not what is actually worth the time, space and effort.

I've sold off virtually all my private collection of military electronics. What I have saved is just:
1. A Wireless Set No.11 - because it was the first true transceiver, at least as a British design (no idea what the Germans or the Americans were doing in the 1930s - but they probaby got there first). Having a single tuning knob for a radio had to be truly great innovation.

2. A Wireless Set No.42 - its a hermetically sealed HF transceiver, in a diecast case, with a "mechanical synthesiser" (don't think PLLs here!). About 20 years ahead of its time at a rough estimate - and a very heavy influence on british military radio that came after it.

I have already mentioned GEE Mk.I - a system worthy of a prime place in say, the IWM. Of course, they will know nothing about it - I dare say there are less than 6 people in the UK now who have any detailed knowledge of it. And yet it was a world first for the UK.

H2S radar would be another one worth saving. No-one in UK appears to have a complete system - or if they have they aren't admitting it. I used to be a part owner of a nearly complete system - but even that didn't have the scanner - and we couldn't locate a scanner anywhere in the UK to make a replica of it.

There are very few of the above to be found in many collections, either in public or private hands.

Of course, the other thing I have in more abundance is fabulous test gear, which nearly always performs better than the stuff it was supposed to test. I refer to things like the HP8640B, HP8560E for instance. Much of the electronics in these products is of the highest possible performance and quality of construction (OK - lets not get into the switches in said HP8640B! )


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Old 10th Dec 2020, 9:22 pm   #91
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And just to follow up again on David's post #89, one very interesting project I was interested in that claimed astonishing things, but the reality turned out to be a bit more mundane, was the TRD VHF transceiver used by the Auxiliary Units Signals Section during WWII.

I am sure I have posted about this before in past years, so I am not going to go into huge detail here about the background to this "stay behind" unit - there is much to astonish and enthrall here, like any good spy tale. What I was intrigued by was the radio set, which was claimed to

a) have been designed and a prototype built in just 15 days by a bunch of radio amateurs,

b) could not be intercepted (i.e. picked up and sense made of the signal) by any ordinary radio receiver.

I did a lot of work on this over quite a few years, and actually personally interviewed the leader of the design team, Dr Ken Ward, when he was well over 90 years old. He's the person who made the second claim above about the signal being impossible to intercept.

Unfortunately he was unable to describe to me exactly what sort of modulation the set used, which apparently made the signal unintelligible to a standard AM receiver - there was little else than AM at the time, and these were definitely voice links used by ordinary, minimally trained members of the public. We did play about on the bench with all kinds of pulse rate modulation, pulse width modulation and the like to see if anything could just produce a sort "garbled noise" in an AM receiver. Nothing worked that we tried.

To complicate things further, the details of the TRD we had (no schematics survive) is just a valve line-up. Essentially there was a double-triode oscillator at around 50Mc/s, modulated by a 6V6. The receiver was an EF39 super-regen (yes, a pentode super-regen does look extremely odd and led to a lot of speculation), with a grounded-triode RF amp in front of that to keep the radiation level from that super-regen stage from going back up the aerial. A whole team spent a lot of time trying to devise interesting things you could do with a pentode super-regen stage - we eventually had to abandon it.

Of course, the team might have missed some amazingly clever solution, which those guys knocked up in 15 days. But I doubt it! They do have some history on their side. The same Ken Ward was personally ordered by Churchill to round up all TRDs after the war, and personally see them sent down a very deep coal mine in Derbyshire and then covered over with a lot of concrete. Or so he claimed......

When we come back to reality, what was astonishing was the scale of the VHF network that was rolled out across the UK, remnants of which now are still there, but very hard to find. Some of the radio links were many miles long, and with just dipole aerials hidden in trees, and 1.5W of RF, I think the engineering of this virtually forgotten radio network was quite a feat. I was involved in trying to get one link to work down in Sussex, using modern amateur gear on 6m and 2m, and we could only get the 2m link with 25W transmitters to work as a talk back link. The 6m one replicating what the old maps say the TRD network achieved we couldn't get to work at the time. We ran out of time to take things further, but it was definitely "hats off" time to the Royal Signals guys who apparently did get these links to work - and with no 2m talkback or mobile phones to help them.....!


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Old 10th Dec 2020, 10:54 pm   #92
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My 14 year old grandson is constantly asking me why i don't buy a new Tv to replace the ancient [his words] 12 year old 50 inch Panasonic plasma flat screen set that's working perfectly that cost £1.200 when new set that's on the wall in the lounge .At the same time he drools over the hacker radiogram at the other end of the room .His mum also drools over my mums 1959 Frigidaire in the kitchen but cant understand why i don't replace my 1970s Hoover senior or the Russell Hobs auto kettle [both wedding presents back in 1976] When i tell them that all of these things are still doing the job they were designed to do so why replace them they just laugh at me .I think time will decide who has the last laugh
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Old 10th Dec 2020, 11:50 pm   #93
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

I had to rush off (for tea) before I properly finished post #91 above. The point I was making in that post was that for a pretty amazing bit of electronics history there is now virtually nothing at all to collect. Sure there is some scanty information, plus a few documented memories, even recordings of some of the veterans of the operation.

The only bit of "hardware" that I possess from that entire network is a piece of balanced feeder cable which was removed from one underground bunker in the network, which was used as a TRD aerial feeder.

So not everything of importance is "collectible".


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Old 11th Dec 2020, 4:56 am   #94
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WWII radar at the time was rather hush-hush. There was a lot of gear made and a lot of people trained-up.

After the war, equipment came on the surplus market, but no-one was interested in preserving it, it wasn't suitable for HF amateur radio, so it got sold for pennies and boiled down for components or went for scrap metal. Some display units bearing VCR97 tubes famously became home-made tellies.

The people, with a fair bit of technical knowledge in their heads, staffed up the nascent TV trade both the broadcast side and the domestic receiver/repair side of things. Rather like the Bletchley 'Ultra' secret people, they didn't say much. They would have had the official secrets act hanging over them. There was also the marine radar industry starting up and hyperbolic navigation systems like Decca's to employ their skills. There were also jobs with the likes of Marconi building the civilian aviation radar and VHF navigation systems.

So, you're left with not much remaining equipment and also with information being thin on the ground.

Both the equipment and the people were absorbed.

I bought one of the RSGB's books about one of the people involved in early radar. Boy was I disappointed. Lots on family life and getting posted to different places, lots of words on how secret it was, no actual information on that 'it'. All human interest, no technical interest. A balanced mixture would have been nice. Two slices of bread do not a sandwich make. The RSGB keep advertising lots of this sort of book, but I'm thoroughly discouraged. I feel like I got done!

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Old 11th Dec 2020, 2:40 pm   #95
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I bought one of the RSGB's books about one of the people involved in early radar. Boy was I disappointed. Lots on family life and getting posted to different places, lots of words on how secret it was, no actual information on that 'it'. All human interest, no technical interest. A balanced mixture would have been nice. Two slices of bread do not a sandwich make. The RSGB keep advertising lots of this sort of book, but I'm thoroughly discouraged. I feel like I got done!

David
David,

I'm afraid that's just about all you will find about early radar. There are quite a lot of books about the social history - who was involved, where they went, the awful working conditions, and what they fed their cat.......

But when it comes to actual technical info of what the technical problems were, what the breakthroughs were, how it worked (or didn't) .......well nearly all of that information has been lost. Trying to find technical handbooks on early radar equipment is well, a whole project in its own right. I (and others) have spent days in the National Archive at Kew trying to see whether any technical documents have survived for specific equipments.

The GEE files at Kew, for instance, do contain complete schematics and parts lists of the first (well one of the first) prototypes. I have copies now of all of it. But try and find the handbook for GEE Mk.I or in fact GEE Mk.II, and you are wasting your time looking there. What you will find is endless copies of letters saying "We are sending you our latest schematics, see enclosed" - only somehow they kept the letter (which is utterly worthless, except to prove person A wrote a letter to person B) but lost the schematic!

The reason is of course very obvious. Most people can relate to the social history. Very few people can get their heads around the technical stuff - you and I are in a very very small minority, in that we can understand the material and actually want to see it.


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Old 11th Dec 2020, 3:15 pm   #96
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If oldness is goodness without any qualification, then older must be better. So tear down that listed building and restore the iron age site it was built over... no... restore the prehistoric forest... um, the primeval swamp.
The issue of "restoration" is one that vexes many people: if you've got something like a 70- or 80-year-old radio it's no doubt had various bits of work done on it over the years - either by technicians-of-the-day replacing parts to keep it working, as part of an official refurbishment, or by generations of radio-hams updating it to retain usability as techniques and modes have evolved.

Given such a piece of gear, what do you 'restore' it as? To original-spec or retaining the accreted period modifications? If you acquire something like an AR88 or R1155 or WS19 which has had its rubber-and-cotton cableforms replaced *by the Military as part of one of their refurbishments* - do you keep it like that or do you replace the 'modern' PVC wiring with the original-as-manufactured rubber-covered types?

[As noted, this has always been an issue with the conservation of historic buildings: a relative was closely involved in the setting-up of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust somr 50-odd years ago, and they had regular arguments about just how a building that had been through several iterations over a 250-year period should be displayed. Example: if you're using the 250-year-old restored building for something like a cafe or shop for visitors, you still need to comply with current food-hygiene and fire-regulations].
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Old 11th Dec 2020, 3:56 pm   #97
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The issue of "restoration" is one that vexes many people: if you've got something like a 70- or 80-year-old radio it's no doubt had various bits of work done on it over the years - either by technicians-of-the-day replacing parts to keep it working, as part of an official refurbishment, or by generations of radio-hams updating it to retain usability as techniques and modes have evolved.

Given such a piece of gear, what do you 'restore' it as? To original-spec or retaining the accreted period modifications? If you acquire something like an AR88 or R1155 or WS19 which has had its rubber-and-cotton cableforms replaced *by the Military as part of one of their refurbishments* - do you keep it like that or do you replace the 'modern' PVC wiring with the original-as-manufactured rubber-covered types?
I would say that you exhibit an item to illustrate what the originator's need was, and how the equipment fulfilled that need. You then have to decide, in the case of WS19 WWII surplus whether you want to illustrate what its first users conceived of it as, or whether you want to deal with the later adopters (usually radio amateurs) who had a quite different purpose for it. A choice has to be made, because its impossible to show both (in most cases).

So taking the WS19 as an example, the Army originally wanted it to talk mainly from tank to tank, but also tank to some ground station - nearly always using ground wave from a mobile whip. It also had to be robust and deal with extremes of abuse from users and the environment, which was often a hot, high vibration innards of a tank on the move. Contacts were often on CW and mostly within 10 miles or so. Anything further afield was mostly "interference" to be avoided.

The amateur users rarely used the WS!9 for its original purpose - probably near to none of them ever worked into an 8' whip on a vehicle. Nearly all will have run it into some kind of skywave aerial, hoping for long range contacts. Environment was extremely different - being nearly always static and in a shed or workshop of some kind.

Many amateur users found the 12V DC power requirement a problem - and quickly built a mains power unit. They also didn't like the headphones so built in audio amps to drive a loudspeaker. There were many other "shortcomings" they found - but really only for their purposes - the equipment was perfectly adequate to meet the Army's original requirement.

Amateurs quite often treated a WS19 as little more than a convenient "pile of bits" which happened to do 2-way radio, and could be re-configured into something very different from the original beast. They effectively demonstrated that they had a quite different requirement to the Army - and the WS19 was used only because it was a) available in quantity, and b) very cheap.

Which of these two is "better"? Well, clearly that's a matter of opinion. For my money, the first purpose (i.e. the Army's) is always going to win out, because so much of that requirement dictates what the WS19 was. In other words, if you want to understand how a WS19 came to exist on the planet at all - its absolutely no use asking the subsequent amateur "users". Its the Army, its culture, its requirements and its documents that you must turn to.


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Old 11th Dec 2020, 4:07 pm   #98
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Originally Posted by G6Tanuki View Post
Given such a piece of gear, what do you 'restore' it as? To original-spec or retaining the accreted period modifications? If you acquire something like an AR88 or R1155 or WS19 which has had its rubber-and-cotton cableforms replaced *by the Military as part of one of their refurbishments* - do you keep it like that or do you replace the 'modern' PVC wiring with the original-as-manufactured rubber-covered types?

[As noted, this has always been an issue with the conservation of historic buildings: a relative was closely involved in the setting-up of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust somr 50-odd years ago, and they had regular arguments about just how a building that had been through several iterations over a 250-year period should be displayed. Example: if you're using the 250-year-old restored building for something like a cafe or shop for visitors, you still need to comply with current food-hygiene and fire-regulations].

Your points above are interesting but I think something of a "red herring". There is absolutely no comparison between the Army refurbing a WS19 with PVC wiring, and an amateur ripping out part of the set because he wants to build in a mains PSU. The first is a simple repair job with the materials that happen to be to hand maybe 20 years after the set was built. The other is taking the equipment as a cheap and available "widget" that happens to do something vaguely like the amateur wants, and then reconfiguring that "widget" for a quite different purpose to what the Army originally intended.

Absolutely nothing that amateurs did to WS19s (or R1155s or AR-88s, etc) tells us a jot about why those equipments ever existed - and to my mind that is the question many historians will want to answer. Why was it designed this specific way, with these components, with that layout, that many stages, and so on.......

The only thing that amateurs contribute to the picture is perhaps some insight into the state of amateur radio at the time - it may be "Interesting" that most amateurs couldn't afford pukka commercial amateur kit (like the Americans apparently could as far back as the 1930s), and didn't want to build from scratch with a pile of brand new parts. AR-88s tend to turn up far less "butchered" at amateur hands, probably because they were originally designed for amateurs anyway. WS19s were most definitely not.

As for the point about modern standards, health and safety and the rest - I would say yes, you must comply when publicly showing off this equipment working (as I have done many times). What people do in the privacy of their own home/shack is entirely a different matter of course. The mods necessary to make something safe, can often be done very discretely, without "ruining" the look or operation of the original equipment.

Richard
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Old 11th Dec 2020, 7:00 pm   #99
Lucien Nunes
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

This example clearly shows the value of a broad-minded approach. There is no one correct way for these items to be. Some will be as-built, others hacked to pieces. They all tell different stories and the job of the museum curator is to listen to those stories, choose which to broadcast and interpret for their audience and to record and conserve.

Quote:
The only thing that amateurs contribute to the picture is perhaps some insight into the state of amateur radio at the time - it may be "Interesting" that most amateurs couldn't afford pukka commercial amateur kit
Or were up to the challenge of making / modding their own. That is an important story to tell too, equally important to that of the WS19. When there are no more radio amateurs and no-one really familiar with 'a radio' as a piece of hardware, the idea that ordinary people could make long-distance communication machines using their own hands, and made them out of old military hardware because electronic materials were expensive, will be that much more interesting. It certainly has the scope to spark enthusiasm in a larger number of minds than a discussion about the evolution of wiring looms fitted to military transceivers, no matter how important that is to us as technical insiders.
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Old 11th Dec 2020, 7:55 pm   #100
dave walsh
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Default Re: The future of vintage electronics ?

Richard I've enjoyed reading the comments of you and others re, I suppose, the philosophy of and possible outcomes, re vintage technology in the future as I am more or less on the route of Chain Home here in Bexhill. I knew a little about GEE system but your explanation about the lack of actual technical info [shades of Enigma perhaps?] has focused me on the subject. It was indeed a very significant national defence system. Could it be there is something buried in a government archive still? I wouldn't think it was Top Secret any more.

Did you see my reference to Peter Scott's link [post 7*] on the "Facebook Old CRT's" thread by Adrian H [6/11/20]? It goes to the story of Truleigh Hill Radar Station at Shoreham. Although there's a great deal of the personal [rather than tech] info-as referred to already in relation to early Radar History, I wonder if there is anything useful to you there? The author refers to his detailed research and there is a section on GEE, seven pages [26 to 32] but 29-35 to print out. That might well be the later version, rather than Mk1 but I wouldn't really know. The Station was in use until demolition in 1958 but perhaps Shoreham itself might be somewhere to look further?

There's also a mention of [for the radar purist] of an eight page detailed description on GEE theory in
"Radar a Wartime Miracle" by Latham and Stobbs but you've probably seen that!

Dave W

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