The AM Forum

In just a little over three weeks from now the Hamvention will be happening. A bunch of us do a AM Pack radio net on Saturday at noon on 3885 and for the most part we all use ww2 or later military field radio equipment. Low power local kind of thing. In the past years we have had between fifteen to as much as thirty people on the net at the event. We also have the largest working collection of BC-611 on the air and talking with each other in the world. Go ahead and check it for yourself but I cannot think of any working group of BC-611 that come close. I have had all assortment of WW2 radios from TBX, BC-611 and last year ran a Navy MAK as net control. This year I have a ARC-5 transmitter and a 1936 RCA USCG receiver that I put together and configured so the entire mess runs from a car battery. Attached is a picture of the set up at home running on the bench.
Looking forward to the Hamvention.

What is the item in the middle?  It appears to be some sort of diabolical Soviet engine of destruction.

It was an old Soviet IFF set, gutted the case and installed a DC to DC converter for providing B+ for the receiver and transmitter along with a dual 6AQ5 push pull modulator and a T/R relay, makes the whole mess push to talk. At first, I also had the transmitter in that box too but had issues getting everything together and keeping it working so decided to go with the 80 meter ARC-5 as a oscillator amplifier and use the IFF box as a modulator power supply.

I don't feel so bad now for not recognizing it!

Somewhere I have a Soviet "ARK-5" carcass (no relation to our ARC-5) which is actually a clone of our BC-433 ADF set of WWII.  Sometime in the 60's they replaced the tubes with solid state modules consisting of hand made circuitry potted in resin built into the base of an octal tube with a Cyrillic model number written by hand in paint.