Paraset Day

[ElectricBill]

There's a group of guys who 'specialise' in replicas of the Paraset, a humble WWII spy radio, and they'll be having an annual exercise on D-Day, June 6th, to warm up the tubes in these little rigs. There's only a few remaining original sets in existence, mostly in WWII Museums, but a fair number of replicas and an enthusiastic crowd represented on the ParasetBuilders Yahoo! group.

Special 1x1 callsigns are being issued for the event so these ops will be easy to spot, typically around the normal 80/40m QRP haunt frequencies.

I plan to fire up my version and have been issued the special call W4A for the duration. Hope I can make a contact or two with the other guys...or anybody else!

Briefly, the Paraset is a 2-tube regenerative receiver and 1-tube xmtr in a valise case. One can only imagine the difficulty and courage of the Allied resistance guys to conceal one of these sets in something like a haystack in Occupied Europe and operating to pass 'secret' messages. Troops nowadays in Iraq (both sides) often have cellfone access!

Needless to say, this is all CW.

I don't know of any official 'site' but Googling "paraset" or lurking onto the Yahoo! group will give all the details about these rigs.

Here's mine before collecting cobwebs:


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-Bill

[Johnnysan]

That's one cool looking set. Did you gut a Jewell test set, or just throw Grandma's silverware in the trash?

[ElectricBill]

I got the Jewell 199 case pre-gutted. ebay.

-Bill