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ABOUT
RKK RADIO MUSEUM
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RKK
Radio Museum Story
Our Museum was established in May, 2000,
after WW II 55th Victory Day celebration. We have collected a dozen of WW II
vets then to our corporate office, and to decorate it some of our employees
brought in several samples of WW II radios. The vets introduced an idea to
start a permanent WW II radio exhibit at our company, RC & C Ltd.
(in Russian - OOO FIRMA RKK).
Well, it was in line with our business,
professional mobile radio systems, so the Museum was started soon. At first our
exhibits had only 12 samples yet some of them were real rarities like E 52a
or E 53 receivers. We have decided to
strictly limit the scope of our samples by the date "1945", the year
when WW II was over.
In the next four years the exhibits have
remained the same and only after RC & C has moved to its new
office building it was decided to start expanding the Museum. Starting June, 2004,
and up to nowadays the number of WW II radios has increased about 15 times.
In our 12 show boxes we have about 130 radios, 30 field
telephones and other wire line military equipment and nearly 20 samples of
test and measurement equipment.
Current
Collections
The WW II radio exhibits
are our main line. We have on display, WW II radios of USSR
manufacture, the radios supplied to the USSR by Lend-Lease agreement
from the USA, Canada and United Kingdom, as well as German Wehrmacht
radios. Out of our 130 radios nearly 20% are Soviet makes, 30% are
Lend-Lease supplies and about 50% are Wehrmacht radios. All of those
to include troops entertainment receivers mostly of Wehrmacht. A few
American "morale radios" are also present in our WW II
collection.
On top of radios, we have
sufficiently expanded our "wire line" collection which
incorporates now not just WW II but also some WW I samples
of field telephones and field telegraphs. There are pretty rare
items there like a small field telephone of Russian ranger of WW I
or telegraphy receiver of 1923 made in Petrograd (another name of St. Petersburg
used since WW I was unleashed).
There are also some vintage
home entertainment radios exhibited in RKK Radio Museum - about 60
tube radios and 40 crystal sets of 1921-1945. There are several
vintage battery portable receivers on display, too.
Special attention was paid
lately to German "people's receivers" (Volksempfänger) so
now we have quite an impressive collection of so-called "Gemeinschaftserzeugnis"
program of joint receiver's production. There are not only VE 301
and DKE receivers on display but also such rarities as DAF 1011,
DOK 36 and DOK 37.
About
the Museum Site
After some internal
discussions, we decided to keep English version of our Museum site
sufficiently truncated as compared to its Russian version. This is
because of lack of human resources that wouldn't allow us to keep
both language versions at the same content level. Those of you who
could read and understand Russian are strongly advised to visit the
Russian version of our Museum site, too.
There are two first reviews in
Russian in place already. One is devoted to National
HRO and its copies, another to German
People's Receivers. Anyone may go there and try to click on blue
links in the Russian text to watch the pop-up pictures.
First of all you are advised
to visit the ALL SHOW BOXES OF
RKK RADIO MUSEUM section and go thru the show boxes and
their cells. We have commented each and every sample displayed
except maybe some smaller accessories.
The BROADCAST
RECEIVER COLLECTION (1921-1945) section contains pictures of
the receivers that we have at RKK Radio Museum. This includes troops
entertainment receivers, vintage tube receivers and crystal sets as
well as German "people's receivers". Gradually there will
be more details of every receiver shown in pop-up screens yet
currently only a few of the samples have such feature. Try to click
on the thumbnails that have model names in blue color.
Same about TEST
AND MEASUREMENT EQUIPMENT OF 1930s AND 1940s section.
Gradually there will be some more details added to every T&M
sample but now we shall apologize for having only general view of
our T&M exhibit and equipment thumbnails.
In VACUUM
TUBES section you may find some displays of the most exotic
tubes of WW II period that we have. Our vacuum tube collection
contains over 400 tube types used in military and related equipment.
We have tube samples of USSR, USA and UK manufacture. Over 60% of
our collection are German Wehrmacht tubes.
We strongly recommend that you
visit also, the Morse Key
collection of Valery Pakhomov, UA3AO. This is the first such
guest collection at RKK Radio Museum site, but it is our intention
to offer our pages to those of our friends radio collectors who have
no other chance to demonstrate their treasures on Internet.
You are advised to click the "Other
Collections" button on the top navigation bar from time to
time.
We would really appreciate any
comments and suggestions regarding our virtual exhibits and sure
would like to see anyone interested in WW II military
communications at our museum premises.
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