In general, military gear is designed to be rugged and reliable. A side effect of this is that the equipment usually has a distinct visual look that many people find appealing. You might not need a laptop that can survive being in a war zone, but plenty of hackers have picked such machines up on the second hand market anyway.
Case in point, the H-250 telephone handset. [Tobias] didn’t actually need a combat-ready phone handset, but loved the way it looked. Technically you can pick these up on eBay for a reasonable price, but then you’ve still got to deal with the weirdo military components inside it. So why not design a look-alike and 3D print it?
[Tobias] came up with a design in OpenSCAD that has a very close resemblance to its military counterpart. Not only has he made the source code for the 3D model available for others who might want to print their own look-alike handset, but the Hackaday.io page also includes a breakdown of the hardware that needs to be added to the printed parts to make it a functional handset.
If you think the H-250 handset looks familiar, it’s probably because it comes standard issue on the TA-1042 field telephone — another very slick looking piece of military gear that we’ve covered previously.
Mil-spec doesn’t mean its particularly good or durable, just that it can withstand being used by crunchies with IQ in 85-90 range.
And built by the lowest bidder.
Not going to lie, that sounds good to me!
The food in the army mess is also milspec.
I took a crack at repairing some of these while on deployment. The wire inside wasn’t wire at all, at least not like I was used to it. it was more like thin metal ribbon wound around thread, covered by disintegrating insulation. In the end, the best I would do was take two broken ones to make one good one.
It’s litz wire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litz_wire), chosen because it reduces skin effect and thus resistance at low AC frequencies. It’s also much more resistant to fatigue due to flexing than regular copper stranded. Side-effect of its construction (with individually-insulated strands) is that it’s not really solderable., which is a pain in the butt. It’s part of why those handsets all have screw terminals on the internal components.
“Withstand being used poorly” is the definition of durable. 😅
MIL Spec just means , can be used with someone who can not read/write, has the attention span of a toddler, and can be built to spec at minimum cost. It need not be particularly good, or even suited to the task. Like the soldiers using it , it needs to be cheap, plentiful, and disposable.
Resisting misuse does in fact mean that it needs to be incredibly durable, one of the factors that goes into the definition of good.
It would be great if y’all could stop repeating this extremely-tired nonsense, especially without real-world examples or having ever actually read a MIL-DTL document. Engineering and producing things to mil spec is actually quite challenging, and the approval and QC processes are onerous.
This is not to mention that ALL THINGS are made at the lowest possible cost; everything you’ve ever owned that was made in a factory was produced this way. That’s a feature of capitalism, not government contracts.
What happens is that military-OWNED equipment is kept forever, long beyond its service life, and there are no things that can withstand infinite abuse. This leads to a bunch of “hurr durr lowest bidder” nonsense that’s used by Reaganites to justify cutting useful government services to, ironically, /give more money to those “lowest bidders”/.
“Case in point, the H-250 telephone handset. [Tobias] didn’t actually need a combat-ready phone handset, but loved the way it looked. Technically you can pick these up on eBay for a reasonable price, but then you’ve still got to deal with the weirdo military components inside it. So why not design a look-alike and 3D print it?”
The Mil H-250x PTT Handset clones available for cheap online are often plug-n-play compatible with “modern” Motorola/Baofeng two-plug walkie-talkie interfaces.[1][2] No need to 3D print your own handset unless you enjoy wasting time, energy, and money.
References…
Tactical Military H-250K PTT Handset Handheld Microphone for Baofeng Kenwood $12.55
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807007061846.html
Tactical Military H-250 PTT Handset Handheld Microphone for Motorola Radio 2Pin $22.00
https://www.ebay.com/itm/224863445904
“No need to 3D print your own handset unless you enjoy wasting time, energy, and money.”
Clearly, you have missed the whole point of Hackaday. We all waste time, energy, and money… in the spirit of science I am sure. Happy Holidays to all!
So far none of the cheap clones use shielded wire. And the one I have also sounds tiny and in general worse than the milspec one’s I have used.
They still use that handset on modern radios. I have beaten more than one against a bulkhead, and my own head trying to get various PRC-117 series radios to link to one satellite or another. They are surprisingly durable and usually failed right where the cable went into the handset or into the radio.
For all the jokes about “military grade” being a warning, stripping away the wire insulation on the cord was an exercise in patience. Its so obstinate that it is very easy to bite to deep and hit the wires underneath. More out of boredom than desperation, we kludged together a few handsets where the cable plugged into a port like a wired phone headset.
Those cables truly are a nightmare, especially on the older handsets where the rubber starts to break down. My experience is all with surplus, but trying to deal with that litz wire is enough to drive someone insane.