"Roger Basford" Roger at new-gate dot co dot uk wrote in
message
et...

"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in
message ...
Roger Basford wrote:
I did try to ID the W9WZE operator in the clip - it's
not Bill Halligan -
any ideas? One suggestion I had was that he was one of
the senior engineers
working for the company. I didn't notice any date on the
captions, so if
that is a post-1941 film then the operating session
would have surely been
staged, as Ham Radio had shut down, so maybe it was done
by using recordings
of the other stations?

Although the ham at the other end called him Bill, if you
say it was not
Halligan, I'll take your word for it. A little later in
the film he and
another man are identified as Bill Halligan and someone
else, whose name
I did not catch.

I assume if you actualy know what Halligan looked like (I
don't) you can
tell them apart and if you are careful at listening for
names, you can
figure it out.

BTW, did anyone notice the one serious flaw in their
design? It was designed
according to the film to work using standard 117 volt
household electricity.
A gasoline generator was included as an addon (a trailer)
that provided
it.

AFAIK they were never used in combat in a place that had
117 volt AC power.

I know that Europe had 220 or 240 volt power, what did
the pacific areas have?

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel
N3OWJ/4X1GM

Hi Geoff,

The guy with the glasses in the scene in the office is
Halligan, that's where they are looking at the drawings
and also inside the RF deck. The other chap in the ham
station part looks different. I suppose it didn't matter
if it was a staged scene.

I suppose that during training in the US there might have
been times when domestic 117 V AC was available but in the
Pacific they probably used domestic power supplies of the
colonial power, so British standard for Australia, Malaya
and the British-administered islands, Dutch for what we
now call Indonesia and possibly US standard for the
Philippines? In Europe 220-240 60Hz is the standard now
but I don't know about WWII, the UK still had areas using
220 V DC at that time.

There's an interesting article on the SCR-399 in Russian
service here -
http://www.w9wze.net/df.php?dn=Featu...hall_Zhukov.wp

Cheers,

Roger/G3VKM

I think you mean 50hz. Power standards have varied all
over the place and are still not uniform. In 1944, for
instance, Los Angeles had both 50hz and 60hz power. A few
areas had DC power (parts of New York City for instance).
Canada around Niagra Falls had 25hz power (made the lights
flicker). In the US standard mains voltages were 110, 115,
117, 120, 125V,220, single phase AC and similar voltages for
DC. There was also three-phase AC at 220, 440, 480, and some
other voltages depending on where you were. Much military
equipment was usually designed with transformers which could
operate from either a nominal 115 or 220 V and could operate
on 50hz as well as 60hz current. Some equipment, like the
BC-779 receiver (Hammarlund Super-Pro) were available with
power supplies that could run on 25hz as well as 50/60hz at
perhaps a dozen voltages.
Undoubedly the BC-60 could run on several voltages and
on 50hz current but the rigs shown in the film are
self-contained meant to operate from the generator sets
supplied.


--

--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL