How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Spy Museum Radio Stuff

[cockpitbob]

While in D.C. this summer we visited the International Spy Museum.  It's not a .gov museum, but a small for-profit museum.  They had a pretend black-bag mission you could go on, which was fun for the family, but mainly it was displays behind glass.  As you would expect, the stuff on display was old since new stuff is still classified, and besides, with modern technology, if they can imagine a spy toy they can make it.

Naturally there was some radio and Morse oriented stuff:

I like the bike generator and the cat supervising.




If I believe the sign, this is THE radio Virginia Hall used in the picture above. 




Paging agent 86.  Well, not a shoe phone but a bug.





A QRP rig after my own heart.  A little more info on the Tenzor (Tensor) radio.  I would give a lot to own one, but it seems they are very, very rare.





Nice little Tx rig with radials on built in reels.  Only problem is it blows itself up.






Very nice little SSB & CW rig.

[Luigi]

The Pacific Science Center in Seattle had the same display. They had an Enigma on site. I spent 20 minutes looking at it. The devices you show look familiar. You must have had a great time.

This site has been a favorite of mine for many years: http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/index.htm
There are some historically accurate cipher simulators. All can be broken today except the one time pad. Have a look.

Remember we cannot legally send encoded messages over the radio... :)
Luigi

[cockpitbob]

At a big ham fle market in Boston someone had 3 Enigma machines on display that he was selling, along with playing a documentary video about them.  He wanted between $12K and $40K depending on the model and condition.  I wanted on so bad I was almost able to justify it as an investment since 30 years from now they'll probably be worth a lot more.  I stood there and drooled for abotu 15 minutes.

[Luigi]

I hope you got a chance to touch them.

Here is a itunes app that I have used with my kids.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mininigma-enigma-machine-simulator/id334855344?mt=8

It is accurate. You can feed in a few historical encoded texts (with the key) and see the plain text. The operation is the same as the real thing.