November 11 is Remembrance Day in Canada. Let’s remember with a wireless perspective.
Our first stop is at the Canadian War Museum/Musée Canadien de la guerre, in Ottawa. The museum is dedicated to the remembrance of the military history of Canada. The architecture of the building, work of Raymond Moriyama, is truly unique and evokes the chaos created by war. The following picture shows the Museum with the wall of windows. What looks like random sequences of short and long windows spell out in Morse code (the first kind of digital signal in the history of wireless) the phrases Lest We Forget and its French translation n’oublions jamais.
The second picture shows a concrete wall of the Museum, next to the visitor entry. The windows spell out in Morse code the letters CWM (for Canadian War Museum) then MCG (for Musée Canadien de la Guerre).
The third picture shows the Peacekeeping Monument in Ottawa, our second stop. The monument is work of Jack Harman, in 1992.
The monument honors more than 110,000 Canadian peacekeepers that served in zones of conflict around the world, since 1948. The monument also evokes reconciliation. The picture focuses on one of the three soldiers, a woman, who carries and operates a portable radio. The radio is a model AN/PRC-25 or AN/PRC-77, which means an army-navy (AN), pack or portable (P), radio (R), receiving and transmitting (C), model number 25 or 27. The usage of this model started in 1962. Over 130,000 units were produced [www.milspec.ca]. Model 25 is a VHF radio, solid state, except for the final stage that uses one power amplifier tube. It is a FM VHF radio (30 to 75.95 MHz), low power (1 to 1.5 Watts) for short-range communications (8 km). Model 77 looks similar to model 22 and was its replacement, from 1968. It has very similar specifications, but it is entirely solid state. The radio is still in use, but solely for training purposes.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Darin for help to indentify the radio model on the Peacekeeping Monument.
Posted by ve3emb 
