[Radio Wrangler]

There's about as much work in getting a piece of radio equipment qualified as there is in developing the thing in the first place (I've spent the last ten years designing radio/radar gear that has to go through full qualification for certified aircraft) What used to make it worse was that until very recently different parts of the world had different formal requirements or sometimes the tests just had to be done different ways, so the qualifications tests and all the attendant paperwork had to be done multiple times. Of course, planes and ships bearing radio gear certified by one country often went into the territory of another, so everything had to interoperate, so the standards were really close equivalents. It's just taken a while for them to team up and start writing coordinated standards requirements. Some of the old standards haven't yet been harmonised completely. Yesterday I was checking a transmitter into 3:1 VSWR mismatches of swept phase angle, but the American standard meant I had to do it all over again into 2:1 VSWR, but with a different power reduction limit...

The marine main receiver qualification was a serious hurdle, but it was proof of some qualitues. Some other receivers would have passed without modification, but the manufacturers were concentrating on other markets and did not see al the hoop-jumping as profitable. Some receivers simply were not good enough in one or more performance areas. The RA17 would have not met the filter template requirements and would have had trouble with the intermod tests.

David