On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:19:23 -0400, William Warren
""w_warren_nonoise\"@comcast(William Warren).net" wrote:

I was just thinking about the Citizen's Band and ways it can be improved.


2. Have a free "afterburner" session, and invite participants to
bring cheap CB amplifiers for destruction. Prizes to the one
which ignites first, etc.

I did just this once in my job. (I wrote about this a few month ago in
some other forum).

I was a US Gov't telecom policy type supervising an upgrade at a
facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba some 25 years ago. We were putting in
some new solid state multichannel demodulators at a comm station. We
were replacing some old tube-type demods which actually were tunable
low-frequency RF voltmeters which dated from the late 40's or 50's.
Each one of these old demods could only tune one channel so a 24
channel system required something like four tall 19" panel racks. They
were cumbersome to use, always drifted off frequency and were a bear
to maintain. The new demod only required about 5 inches of a single
relay rack, so there was a huge floorspace savings and of course the
new demods were a cinch to use and required virtually no maintenance.

These old demods had been a thorn in my side for many years at many
facilities. Mercifully it was only the Navy that had them. (I worked
with all services.) Regulations said that the decommissioned
equipment was to be returned to a Navy depot in the States for reuse.
This is exactly what I wanted to avoid for any time I wanted to
upgrade a Navy facility, Big Navy folks would always tell me that they
wouldn't buy modern equipment because they had a couple hundred of
these old things in depots. So the last thing I wanted to do was sent
them back to the States. I asked the Commanding Officer of the Gitmo
facility what options he had. He said he could either return them to
the depot or turn them over to a training function. Since we were
surrounded by a decidedly unfriendly Cuba on three sides and the
Caribbean on the fourth side, I asked the CO if he had ever had an
emergency destruction drill. He hadn't. His facility had emergency
destruction incendiaries in place but we couldn't burn that down so we
took all these old demods to the firing range, stacked them up in
piles, and place Thermite charges on the piles. It didn't take very
long to reduce the demods to molten metal and glass. When I prepared
the "Disposition Report of Excess Equipment" for the CO's signature, I
simply stated that the equipment was transferred to a "training
function."

Jon, W3JT