A personal collection of historic radios
Photographs, sets and the documents that belong with them.
This is not a complete history of radio, and it is not a shop. It is one collection, built over fifty-five years, published so that other people can identify a set, match it to a manual, and see how the equipment was actually used.
The pieces come from Britain, the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan and elsewhere. They include broadcast receivers, army and navy sets, airborne equipment, radar, test gear and the power supplies that kept them running. Beside many of the radios there are original or contemporary documents — working instructions, data sheets, leaflets and training notes.
How the site is arranged
Think of it as a set of trees, not a catalogue of products.
Each main section is a subject — British army sets, German army signals, airborne radio, test instruments, and so on. At the centre of a section there is often one document or one family of equipment that explains the rest. From that centre the individual radios, power units, antennas and manuals branch out.
The first tree of that kind is German army signals in the Second World War. The leaflet Merkblatt 48 b/20 (10 July 1943) lists the accumulators, generating sets, rotary converters, rectifiers, dummy antennas and test gear issued with those radios. The German section starts from that leaflet and then leads to the sets and papers that it names.
Main sections
Why start with the Merkblatt?
A radio on a shelf does not explain itself. A wartime leaflet that tells you which dynamotor, which battery and which dummy antenna belonged to a 15-watt set does. Merkblatt 48 b/20 is that kind of document for German army signals. It is not the history of all German radio — the Luftwaffe, the navy and the civilian receiver are different trees — but it is a reliable centre for the army equipment in this collection.
Other sections will be built in the same way when the right “centre” document is on the table: a British EMER or working instructions for the 19 Set, a US NAVSHIPS manual for a ship set, a maker’s data sheet for a test instrument.
What you will find at the moment
The collection itself is large. The public site is not, yet. Sets are being photographed and written up in stages. Some pages will be only a name and one picture until the notes and the paperwork catch up. That is deliberate. A labelled photograph is more use than a promise of a finished encyclopaedia.
- Open a section and browse by country, service or role.
- Open a radio page for photographs first, then the short description, then any documents attached to that set.
- Open the library if you already know the leaflet or manual and want to work the other way.
If you have come from the old shop-style pages, you are in the same collection. The purpose has simply been made clearer: information first.