On March 10th, Carroll-WX4Y, Mac-KF4LMT, and I went over to the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum to do a closer inspection of some of the radio gear that came with the B-17 that is currently undergoing restoration. We met Jerry, Marshall, and Jim and got our official "City of Savannah" t-shirts and volunteer name tags. We're now official! We only had a couple of hours so we went over to the equipment store room and got right to work. We opened up the case on the BC-348 Receiver and were pleasantly surprised at just how clean and well preserved everything looked. Wow, what a beautiful piece of equipment! No sign of damage or age whatsoever. Amazing how well this 65+ year old radio looks! Carroll seems to think that this radio will be no problem at all to get running. After some photos and documenting, we closed the case and moved on to an RT-18/ARC-1 VHF transceiver. This particular radio was not in quite the condition that the reciever is in. But, everything appears to be in place and "fixable". Took some more photos and made some more notes then put the case back on this one. After we cleaned things back up a bit we talked about some next steps. Carroll is going to try to find a service manual and schematic diagrams of the radios. Mac is going to find some articles on BC-348 restorations for future reference, and I'm going to research the RT-18 and find out the best way to clean the exterior cases and control panels. On our next visit we plan to bring some of Carroll's test equipment to test the tubes and capacitors. It was a great visit and we are on our way!
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