Do They Have the Fourth Of July in England?

Last night, I dreamt of a radio that's so old, a manual for it is being sold by a company called Vintage Manuals.

The radio is (I assume there are some around somewhere) the RT178/ARC-27. It's a massive hunk of metal, better suited as a boat anchor than a radio, and I used to work on it, back when I was an aircraft radio repairman. Tubes out the wazoo. Big cooling fins. Once you were done messing with the innards, you'd slide the chassis into its heavy metal case, put a line of sealant around the four sides of the top where it met the case, torque down the twelve or so screws to secure the top to the case, and pressurize it. This jewel was used in aircraft (and, in at least one case, in a car; boy, did that ever give it great traction in the snow) so it had to be able to withstand low-pressure situations.

Oh, yeah, and it weighed about a thousand pounds -- or at least thats what it felt like when you were walking across a flight line, lugging it. If you could, you took the radio shop's little red wagon. It startles me to think that at one time I'd casually hoist one of these onto my shoulder and head on out. If I did that now, I'd head right on out into the emergency room.



The ARC-27 was part of a larger dream where I was going out to a Minuteman launch complex (one of my former jobs was as a launch crew member; sixty feet underground, bored out of our minds, and ready to change the world into a nuclear hotplate) to swap out a radio. I didn't do that in real life, but in the dream, I did. In real life, too, the launch control capsule wasn't massive, with thirty or forty people wandering round, and with a great big picture window, but in the dream, yeah. I think my memory of the real thing was supplanted by Disney's version -- which is, of course, much prettier. This is what the real one looked like.

Dreams are funny things.

Happy Fourth, everyone -- no matter where you are.