Wireless sets No. 19 MK ll - 1942

[Jon Skagfeld]

Originally posted by Bruce Parker
19 sets were not that bad!! Yes, they used the shotgun approach to tuning and may have had a slight tendency to bounce off frequency, but all and all took a lot of abuse and kept working. The advice in the manual is to 'search boldly' for an incoming signal (lest you spend a lot of effort trying to make sence of a weak side signal) and that, I think, is advice for anything you do in life.

In WW2, there was apparently only one trooper per battalion who truly understood how to net the sets (i.e., get them all tuned to the same frequency). It was that poor schmucks job to hop from turret to turret before every action to get things working.

I concur, saving a set is great. The date would imply it is an 'English only' version rather than the later 'English/Russian' ones. That alone is quite rare. If you would like an independent, Canadian evaluation of value, price, etc., P.M....

Does it look like this? This one is dated 1942 and is Serial No. C127.

Bruce: Check that serial number. I think you dropped some numbers.

Hanno: I'd highly recommend two things;

1. Get it!

2. Navigate the site given to you above. You can "register" your set there, much like Keith's Old CMP site.

That Mk II is a fairly "rare" piece of kit, if only because of the fewer radios produced. The one offered to you is a C 12000 serial number. In comparison, my Mk III is in the C73000 range. There would appear to have been far less MkIIs built than MK IIIs.

I'm a stickler for having my master clock set to the correct time. After an all-too-frequent power outage, I find that my 60+ year old 19 set's sensitivity is far superior in pulling in a time signal than is a commercial HF receiver sitting next to it.

BTW, Dan Caldwell has about four Mk IIs and could be a future source of info for you.