K6LHA wrote:

There have been a great number of civilian fixed station equipments that
have been designated as "military" (by the addition of a sticker/label)
as far back as 1953 without any special tests, physical or
electronic, without any changes or additions in appearance. None of
these were intended for field use up to about 1980 or so, therefore they
would not have undergone full environmental testing. Consider them
"COTS" (Commercial Off-The- Shelf) equipments as described by Hans.

Let me put it this way.

If you are going to design a product for the military, (And you must
admit military contracts are the "800 pound gorillas" in the business).
And by simply tweaking a tuning slug it will work as well on the ham
bands.. and the device is not "Classified" in and of itself.

Why not market to hams as well?

Now, I do admit that the military has some classified stuff that I'll
likely never set eyes on.. But then one of the reasons I know they were
using KWM-2a's in Viet Nam is a ham who returned from there, tears in
his eyes, telling of how a fairly large number of said radios were
"De-Militarized" (Trust me folks, you don't want to know) Perfectly
good ham radios were being totaly reduced to their atoms because they
were part,, Mind you just part, of a classified communications system.

Never mind that they were a part you could buy over the counter at Ham
Radio Outlet.. they were still part of a classified system so they were
blown up, drilled, shot, flamed, run over with tanks and otherwise
redced to powder.

A total waste of thousands of dollars worth of hardware that could have
been sold, without danger of compromising the classified system at all
since this was just a part.

I mean.. I'm sure that somewhere in that system was a 5 amp AGC-3 size
fuse... How would re-selling that part comprimise the entire system (it
was, at the time, a common car part)