Saw the coolest old avionics bench at the Pima Air & Space Museum

They have a full restoration shop you can look into, and I spotted a 1970s-era test bench for Collins radios. It had these huge manual tuners and a separate signal generator the size of a microwave. Made me really appreciate how much smaller and faster our modern gear is. Anyone know if places still use that kind of vintage equipment for keeping old birds flying?

3 comments

3 Comments

taylor.sean1mo ago

My buddy who works on warbirds says they absolutely do. He was troubleshooting a radio in a T-6 and had to borrow a signal generator from a museum because the manuals called for one. Makes sense when the whole plane is a period piece, you need the right tools.

the_sam1mo ago

Makes total sense, it's like trying to fix an old car with only modern scanners. Sometimes you just need the original equipment to talk to it right.

taylor_park7528d ago

But what if that old gear is actually holding us back? I get what @taylor.sean's buddy is doing, but constantly hunting for museum pieces seems like a losing battle. At some point you have to adapt the old systems to work with modern, reliable test equipment. Keeping 50 year old bench gear running just to fix a 50 year old radio is a recipe for never flying. New tools can be made to talk to old stuff if you try hard enough.