thumb|right|upright|SCR-536 "handie talkie". thumb|upright|BC-611 on display at National Cryptologic Museum The SCR-536 (also referred to as the BC-611) was a hand-held radio transceiver used by the US Army Signal Corps in World War II. It is popularly referred to as a walkie talkie, although it was originally designated a "handie talkie".
thumb|right|upright|SCR-536 "handie talkie". thumb|upright|BC-611 on display at National Cryptologic Museum The SCR-536 (also referred to as the BC-611) was a hand-held radio transceiver used by the US Army Signal Corps in World War II. It is popularly referred to as a walkie talkie, although it was originally designated a "handie talkie".
== History == The SCR-536 is often considered the first of modern hand-held, self-contained, "handie talkie" transceivers (two-way radios). It was developed in 1940 by a team led by Don Mitchell, chief engineer for Galvin Manufacturing (Motorola Solutions) and was the first true hand-held unit to see widespread use. By July 1941, it was in mass production. In November 1942, the SCR-536 received coverage in the amateur radio magazine QST. It appeared on the cover as well as in Signal Corps advertising, and was featured as part of an article on the Signal Corps, "Smallest field unit of the Signal Corps", in which a photo caption read: "it is not much larger or heavier than a conventional handset". It was carried among the first waves to hit Omaha Beach at Normandy in June 1944 (and in Italy, Sicily and North Africa before that). Every rifle company of the U.S. 29th Infantry division had six; one for each of the three rifle platoons, two for the weapons platoon, and one for the company CO. The Germans were deeply impressed by the SCR-536 and the SCR-300 after capturing several units in Sicily. By war’s end, 130,000 units had been manufactured by Motorola. They were also produced by other firms.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).