Vintage equipment in modern educational settings - opinions

[Radio Wrangler]

If all the museums vanished overnight, the universe would lumber on, unperturbed.

What would be affected are people. Museums can entertain people, inform people, and educate people... Putting a smile on Reith's face.

We're on the 'already knows' side of the fence. Judging how well museums do things really has to be done mostly from the visitor's eye view. One extreme is to have things beautifully preserved or not in glass cases. Visitors in the age group with most to discover don't seem engaged. At the other extreme are things which amount to little more than game playing... lots of action but no engagement of thinking muscles.

It isn't just technology type museums. Guides in local castles joke that visitors are most interested in where the latrines come out, and where's the torture chamber?

For a museum to work, it has to break through a bit of a barrier, different for each visitor.

Someone who moans "Look what you've done to that xxxxx!" already knows what one should be like and doesn't need the museum to show him. He's not the target audience.

There is need for both perfect preservation and things to give the hands-on feel.

David

[mark_in_manc]

I have enjoyed this thread...I wonder if I could add another direction to it? I used to lecture in noise and vibration at a lower-ranking university. The thread title made me remember how much 60s and 70s lab gear was still in use when I left (10 years ago) and how entirely suitable I thought that was. Of course I wouldn't really want to consult with a 2 channel instrument from which data had to be extracted via GPIB, 3.5" floppy and eventually usb stick (though sometimes I did ) - but giving students up-to-the-minute lab gear often plays up to the prejudices of the weakest ('this old rubbish is awful!) while removing all the repetitive nuts-and-bolts setup which they will get wrong, and then come to understand why it matters. A modern instrument is often a short cut to an answer which might be right, or might not be, but you will need an old guy who knows in which ways a measurement can go wrong, to tell you which it is.

Well, that's my 5p. The more able the student, the easier it is to sell them on the above argument, in my experience. That's a shame for the weakest, as it's easy to sell them a pup (or a simulation).

[G6Tanuki]

I guess it has to be a case of "horses for courses".

Example: a while back I arranged a visit to my house [built in the early-1800s, now Grade-2 listed] by the local History Society.
One of the visitors - who turned out to be a Professor of History at one of the 1980s 'Polyversities' - was most obnoxious, complaining that the last couple of centuries had 'horribly corrupted and despoiled this valuable piece of architectural heritage' by having the cheek to install things like running water, indoor sanitation, central heating and electricity. He didn't like it when I pointed out that without such 'modern despoilments' the house would be declared unfit for habitation. I've not allowed the History Society back.

When it comes to radios, I'm quite happy to see something like a 1940s/50s valve radio showing off 'period' repairs [Radiospares capacitors in place of the originally-fitted war-surplus parts, for example]. And WWII-era gear like AR88, WS19 and R1155 receivers that have been reworked [often by 'official' workshops like REME or contracted-out to commercial operations like MEL or Decca] with PVC insulated wiring and 1950s/60s components are fine by me.
Similarly, I accept 'period' amateur-modifications of such gear like fitting product-detectors and voltage-stabilisation of the LO/BFO so that cheap WWII-era surplus-radio you bought as a student in the 50s/early-60s could sensibly resolve that new-fangled SSB that all the amateurs took to using.

The alternative fate for many such receivers would have been the tip.

"Period" repairs continue to this day; I like seeing yellow MKT/MKP capacitors in old equipment; it gives me confidence that someone has been here before me and done a proper job!


I like stuff that works. Safely, and Reliably. I don't like 'exhibits'.

[Radio Wrangler]

At Bletchley Park, the RSGB has a re-constructed hut showing amateur radio to visitors. It may have changed in the 12 years since I was there. But it had a very uncluttered look, which seems to be the style of modern museums. To me it looked a bit empty. There was a long room with a few exhibits showing typical stations of three eras. There was a sort of breadboard arrangement of about 1929, then an LG300 based station of the mid fifties, and then I think it was a KW2000 setup. All fine, all representative, but there seemed to be a lot of space between them.

This room led off to a separate, smaller one with an up-to-date setup. Someone, Yaesu Musen, I think had given the exhibition a full set of all their top of the line equipment. It all lit up, it looked very modern.... it looked blisteringly expensive. It made anyone not familiar with the scene thing that anything reasonably up to date was millionaires only territory. There were no price tags on it, but it was styled to look much more expensive than it really was. There was nothing in the exhibition that informed people that there was a lot they could do on poxket money. The exhibition spoke to the people it was trying to introduce to the hobby, and what it said was "You probably can't afford it"

They'd failed to view it as the people they were trying to reach would see it.

Here in Dunfermline there used to be an annual hobbies exhibition in a large music pavilion in a superb park (Thank you Mr Carnegie). The local amateur radio society would join many other different clubs and societies and have a stand - positioned near opening windows to get to cables to antennae up in the trees. It was a live station. Gear to the wall, operators backs to the visiting public.... oh dear. They were presenting Dunfermline to the world, they weren't presenting amateur radio to the people of Dunfermline. It took some doing to talk them into a different layout. There were seats in an arc around each rig. Visitors could sit and talk with the operator and see the panels of the gear. They could be invited to tune around on receive and see what they could find. The degree of engagement with the visitors went up dramatically. We didn't fill up as much log book space, but people around the town better knew what we got up to, and we made a few new members. Only a few, but a big improvement on zero.

It's very important to have decided what you're trying to do.

My neighbour was surprised at the sound quality coming out of a Hacker Herald I'd restored. Some months later I picked up another as a freebie in non-working and splashed in paint condition. I sorted the chassis, he did a storming job on picking all the paint off of the vinyl and getting the cabinet looking 100% He loves showing it to his visitors and the sound surprises them. Theyre mostly used to mobile phones and maybe MP3 speakers.

Working stuff is a lot more engaging for the general public and can win some converts.

David

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

My neighbour was surprised at the sound quality coming out of a Hacker Herald I'd restored. Some months later I picked up another as a freebie in non-working and splashed in paint condition. I sorted the chassis, he did a storming job on picking all the paint off of the vinyl and getting the cabinet looking 100% He loves showing it to his visitors and the sound surprises them. Theyre mostly used to mobile phones and maybe MP3 speakers.

Indeed; I've impressed a few people with my pair of Roberts R707s, doing Stereo by way of two of the mobile-phone-to-FM-band transmitters that were ubiquitous in the early-2000s to give 'handsfree' working but which now can be scarfed for £1 a time at car-boot-sales.

Split the left/right audio from your streaming-source. One channel goes to one FM-microtransmitter, the other to the second. Set the transmitters up on well-spaced frequencies in the FM band, then tune your pair of old-style FM receivers accordingly. Something like a R707 powered by a SLA [on account of its ability to deliver loads of current on audio peaks] can sound great, even when you turn the bass-boost up to the max.

Equally, I have fed a MP3 of the old "numbers stations" through such FM transmitters... which caused much confusion.

[Joe_Lorenz]

I agree to what David has already mentioned:

"There is need for both perfect preservation and things to give the hands-on feel."

And I'd like to add a third category. That is "Dusty and rusty"! Some years ago I got a 1934 AEG Geadux 112 in aged condition, never finding time to restore it. Finally I cleaned it a little bit and put it in our living room on display. I love the looks and the contrast to a "like new" restored Telefunken Markstein II of same age. But most visitors are attracted first by a 1960s Nordmende which is on duty for more than 8 hrs every day. Looking inside that one you'd find few original components though.

Joe

[emeritus]

In the 1990's I was working for GEC , and the Marconi Museum was still at the Marconi Research Centre at Great Baddow. When I visited it, the curator mentioned that, when they had visits from schools, he would fire up a miniature spark transmitter and its receiver so they could actually see one in operation. He did say that it was probably contravening some regulation or the other, but he wasn't too bothered as it wasn't done often: the site was doing experimental radio work anyway, and no-one had complained.

[trh01uk]

Radio Wrangler said above (post #21):

"There is need for both perfect preservation and things to give the hands-on feel."

That's quite right - and the two objectives are usually incompatible. Its much more important for the casual museum visitor to engage with an exhibit, that looks approximately right, and makes noises or shows displays, and even better - offers interaction by twiddling knobs and so on. That inevitably means changes for safety, and to replace long obsolete parts, like resistors, capacitors, etc. But these are of no importance to such visitor who likely has no clue what a resistor or capacitor is anyway....

On the other hand, preservation can be just as important for quite different reasons. Old things that a truly "as built" get rare......often down to literally one remaining example. And when that happens, that one remaining example is usually our only record of what the item was, what materials it was constructed with, etc. As soon as you rip out resistors and replace them with carbon film modern equivalents, you have lost irreplaceable history.

Probably most people on here never see items of that sort of rarity - in the field of electronics, radio and TV. Knowledge of such items quickly gets "lost" because no-one in the community knows about them. These are not your AR-88s, HROs, WS19s, and similar in the broadcast radio field. There remains hundreds of good original examples of these. But here are some examples of historic electronics where we are down to the last one/two (and possibly zero because I'm not sure either):

• GEE ground transmitters (first hyperbolic navigation system worldwide - one in the London Science museum)
• Chain Home equipment (I don't know of any of it, anywhere)
• Wireless Set No.42 (one, maybe two left in UK - remarkable early HF hermetically sealed transceiver)
• H2S first airborne radar system (no complete examples as far as I know)
• Colossus (we have a replica - I don't know how accurate that is historically)

I submit the above as examples of critical technology at the time, which is worthy of preservation for the long term.

Its possible that bodies like the IWM and Science Museum are quietly preserving stuff in their reportedly cavernous archives that ordinary punters like me never get to hear about. But when I did approach museums about H2S some 10 years ago, I got the same response: "Sorry we don't have it"......


Richard

[Sergeauckland]

I think this perfectly illustrates the problem. One example at least should be kept totally original (if that's possible , as it may have been repaired unsympathetically when these things weren't considered important) but that original is most unlikely to work, and even if it does, is far too valuable to risk 'wearing out'.

Consequently, all working examples won't be original, but I don't think that matters as long as the differences are internal and not visible to the public, who as mentioned above, are unlikely to know the difference.

I knew that 'Colossus' at Bletchley Park wasn't original, but it was still very much impressive, especially since one of the volunteer guides told me of the clever way a single EF37A was used as a logic gate.

S.

[emeritus]

The old Marconi (now BAE) Research Centre at Great Baddow still has a mast that was originally used in the Chain Home transmitter station at Canewdon. You can see the top part poking over the horizon from the A12 Chelmsford bypass. I think the four masts of a Chain Home receiver station are still in situ at Dover, re-purposed to hold modern antennas. But I suppose the electronics must all have been scrapped decades ago.