Wireless Set No.19

Keeping the blog updated during the summer months has always been difficult for me, and this year has been even more busy than usual.  I thought I'd take advantage of a bit of spare time over Christmas to bring the blog up to date

Just before Easter I started  work on my Wireless Set 19, which turned out to be my biggest project in several years.

WS19 in Sherman tank 1943 (National Army Museum Copyright)

The Wireless Set No 19 was designed originally for tanks and armoured fighting vehicles used by British and Canadian forces in WW2, but later also used extensively in jeeps, trucks and even as a man-portable ground station. There are many excellent sources of  information on the internet so I won't go into great detail here, but the WS19 provided two radios in one box, plus intercom facilities for the tank crew.  The 'A' set was for HF W/T or R/T over longer distances while the 'B' set was used for very short range VHF comms between tanks.

My first experience of the iconic '19 Set' was as a kid in the 1970s. Thousands of sets had been sold as army surplus in the 1960s and although I never owned one myself back then, many radio amateurs that I knew did. 19 sets were often heavily 'modified'  or even broken up for spares without too much thought, as they were cheap and pentiful. 40-odd years later 19 sets and accessories have now become very collectable and sell for big money on internet auction sites. I recently saw a complete (but not guaranteed working) WS19 station with an asking price of nearly £1000!

Sometime after the war, large numbers of 19 sets were completely rebuilt (without the 'B' set) and many were then put into storage. Markings on the front panel of my British WS19 MKIII suggest that it was rebuilt at the Newark workshops of the Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers (REME). Unfortunately the date has been rubbed off, but based on similar sets I've seen I expect that it would have been late 1950s.

My WS19 MKIII

In the next blog I'll describe what I had to do to get the set working again.

Keep listening!