Wireless Set, Canadian No. 29

[David Dunlop]

Bruce.

Back in the 70's and 80's here in Winnipeg, Princess Auto used to have a supply of No.29 Set items. At the time, I was focused on 19-Set equipment and the only reason I noticed the 29-Set items was because of their similar general look to the 19-Set parts they were intended to replace. I eventually did pick up the Power Supply and B-Set units for the 29-Set along with the manuals, but eventually passed them along to another collector several years ago.

The odd thing about the Princess Auto 29-Set items, was the complete lack of A-Sets, Antenna Tuning Units and all the related fiddley bits. All they had were the two aforementioned components, the Carriers and the boxes these items shipped in.

Never saw any of the 29-Set items show up at local Ham Radio Swap Meets, but I did run into a chap at one meet who had worked at RCA towards the end of the war, on the 29-Set project. He told me the two main driving forces behind development of the 29-Set had been to keep the reliability of the 19-Set while improving on the stability of the 19-Set, and also increase the flexibility of the whole set. There were also a number of smaller complaints about the 19-Set that had accumulated throughout the war that had been left on the back burner for future consideration. One of these smaller issues was that whenever operators had to confirm if a 19-Set power supply was set up for 12 or 24 volts, they had to disconnect too much stuff to inspect the switch inside the PS case. RCA solved this with the small round two-sided ID tags on the front of the 29-Set PS and B-Set.

Apparently RCA was not able to improve much on the stability issues, and although the 29-Set was much more flexible than the 19-Set, it lost some of it's reliability in the process. This was all of little concern to RCA, because even while they were developing the 29-Set, they were aware the future of AM equipment in the military was going to be a short one.

To this day, I have not seen a 29-Set A Set in Winnipeg, in any condition. I wonder if, assuming they were disposed of in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the government insisted the A-Sets be pulled from all stock and destroyed rather than being surplussed out. So much military development work was destroyed at that time (Cold War mentality perhaps?).

David