It is Saturday morning, 0500 EDT. I am tuned to 3885 kHz, listening to the Old Military Radio Net. It is on 3885 kHz. Why this frequency?
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-536
Gemini explains:
The frequency 3885 kHz is inextricably tied to one of the most iconic military radios of World War II: the BC-611 Handie-Talkie (part of the SCR-536 radio set).
Manufactured by Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (which later became Motorola), the BC-611 was the world’s first ubiquitous handheld, two-way AM transceiver. It was the "walkie-talkie" you see clamped to the ears of infantrymen in every classic WWII movie.
The technical marriage between this specific radio and 3885 kHz came down to how the military deployed them and what happened immediately after the war:
1. The Channels Were Commandeered
The BC-611 could operate anywhere from 3.5 to 6.0 MHz by swapping out internal plug-in coils and quartz crystals. Because the U.S. government temporarily shut down all civilian amateur radio operations "for the duration" of WWII, the military freely assigned tactical frequencies right inside what used to be the ham bands.
For company and platoon-level communications, 3885 kHz became a standard assigned military channel.
2. The Great Surplus Avalanche
When WWII ended, the military had hundreds of thousands of BC-611 units, along with mountains of spare FT-243 crystal units, sitting in warehouses. The government liquidated them to the civilian market for pennies on the dollar.
Hams returning from the war snapped them up. Because these units were strictly crystal-controlled (you couldn't just spin a dial to change frequency), you were locked onto whatever crystal was inside.
3. A Lasting Living Tradition
Even though a BC-611 only pushed out a fraction of a watt of AM power (using a tube filament battery and a 108-volt B+ battery), hams quickly realized that if they gathered on 3885 kHz, they could hear each other locally.
That specific frequency choice was entirely forged in the surplus markets of 1945 and 1946. Eighty years later, the tradition is so deeply ingrained that military radio collectors and vintage AM operators still hold a massive, synchronized check-in on 3885 kHz every year during the Dayton Hamvention weekend.
Interesting. Wonder when did Galvin (later Motorola) began their FM handy-talkie efforts, and what frequency band(s) did they use? I read it was key in the later campaigns. -73
ReplyDeleteGreat history!
ReplyDeleteIf you're just going to dump AI slop, why bother posting at all?
ReplyDeleteI know there are readers who object to anything produced using AI. This post is in that category. But those who object would presumably have accepted the videos or other content found through the use of a search engine, right? Perhaps those who object to this kind of material should just turn off their computers, wait for the next delivery of QST or 73 Magazine (!) and hope that no AI tools were used in their production. Also, I would point our that reading this blog is entirely optional.
DeleteBill, you're the one who's been complaining about fewer and fewer readers. One of the reasons is that search engines like Google aren't returning as many links--they're giving LLM-generated summaries. Those summaries were scraped from millions of websites that were generated by real people's work (including yours). Food for thought.
DeleteSure, there is plenty to be said about the unfairness of the situation, but the fact is that AI provides a lot of info and lot of useful code. I'll bet that MOST of our readers and listeners are using AI. We are using it in place of the search engines. In the old days, before AI, you would do a Google search, then you would have to scour the websites that Google provided. You'd have to decide which were trustworthy and which were not. No more. Just ask Gemini or Claude. Is it unfair that they are just regurgitating stuff from other people's web sites? I think so. But that doesn't make the info provided any less valuable. It is kind of simple-minded to label all of the output "AI slop" and complain about its use. 73 Bill N2CQR
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