Quote:
Originally Posted by turretslug
I have heard the BC-191/-375 described as produced en-masse in the early '40s to a design from the early '30s with valves from the early '20s! Possibly a bit of poetic licence there but maybe not so far of the mark.
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Certainly the design of the BC-375 is starkly crude, with VFO feeding directly into 4 PA valves in parallel. The so-called MOPA layout. The performance is correspondingly crude, these sets being known for terrible chirp on CW. All one can say about them is that they were "good enough" most of the time. And we won't know about the times when they weren't good enough - those sets were probably lost along with the plane and crew.
The T1154 equivalent transmitter used by the RAF is similarly crude - and again is a 1930s design rushed into production for the war effort.
The truth about wartime production is that money might be no object but there is no time to invent wondrous improvements when solutions already exist. So famously the WS19 prototypes were knocked up in 6 weeks, and though they then had to be greatly improved over the next few years, the basic design - along with a myriad of flaws - stayed in use for the next couple of decades.
One area where there was true innovation was RADAR, and that was because there was nothing pre-existing to fall back on. It all had to be invented from scratch.