Russian Ammo Ban

Good news, in a gritty way.

Freeing up Russian manufacturing + American Sanctions (Bullying) frees up Russian manufacturing capacity.

They may not have quite as many rubles to buy expensive imports, but they are pushed in the direction of Vertical Integration - where they make all their own stuff.

The 2 most powerful companies I’ve worked at did all their own manufacturing. Wiltron-Anritsu (microwave instrumentation, that competed with HP/Agilent/Keysight) and Litton Electron Devices (travelling wave tubes, radar systems, etc.)

Wiltron was pushed into it by headaches related to farming out their machining, they turned around and brought it all in house.

There weren’t many companies in Silicon Valley that could metallize ceramics, so Litton metallized their own ceramics. This gave them the tools to build particle accelerators, and to stand off extremely high voltages - like 1 million+ volts.

If sanctions lead Russia to follow in the path of Wiltron and Litton EDD, they will be much stronger for it.

Anritsu - some of the best test equipment I ever used. I can’t remember the model number but I used a communication system tester when I worked for Ericsson for testing mobil handsets (we call them cell phones these days :slight_smile: ). I remember writing a bunch of VB scripts to create automated test cases using that device. It was very cool back in those days.

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Anritsu - some of the best test equipment I ever used. I can’t remember the model number but I used a communication system tester when I worked for Ericsson for testing mobil handsets (we call them cell phones these days :slight_smile: ). I remember writing a bunch of VB scripts to create automated test cases using that device. It was very cool back in those days.


I was the Mechanical Design Supervisor in the Microwave Components Lab when they were developing the 360 Vector Network Analyzer.

Mostly that gave me a chance to watch one of the Senior Microwave Engineers, Bill Oldfield, be a one man army.
Definitely the most skilled engineer I have worked with.

In one case, he asked the Manufacturing Engineering manager to make the saw cuts that create the 4 fingers of a K connector, their 0.5 to 46 GHz coax connector.
The manager said, it was not manufactureable.

So Bill went into his personal machine shop, fired up his 30,000 rpm slitting saw, and made 4 cuts and 8 fingers on a tube of the same ID and OD.
Way harder than making 2 cuts, because the fingers will just fly off and embed themselves in the ceiling.

He put the part with 8 fingers on the manager’s desk and pretty much said nothing.

I don’t know what the manager was thinking, he was hired to manage the staff that programmed the CNC machines and designed the tooling, 1/2 of it to build stuff that Bill himself designed.
Watching Bill teach machining to this experienced machinist-turned-manager was pretty interesting.

Bill did almost exactly the same thing to Julius Botka, who was kind of Bill’s counterpart at HP/Agilent, the most senior microwave guy.
There was an IEEE/MTTS conference where both Julius and Bill presented papers.

Botka presented a paper where he said that an SMA compatible connector that goes to millimeter wave frequencies, is impossible. Then he described their work on a non-SMA compatible HP proprietary millimeter wave connector.

Bill had the next paper, and presented the millimeter wave SMA compatible K connector. HP’s work was interesting but Bill pretty much shredded what Mr. Botka had to say about SMA compatibility being un-attainable.
Basically, HP went with the easier design. They probably sold a lot.

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I like those types of stories. Thanks for sharing!

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Great idea! Now to go argue with me wife.

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Its realistic to buy enough defense ammo imo like 1k rounds of caliber of choice… but you can never buy enough range ammo, and if you aren’t shooting constantly its about as useful as a sword you never practiced with against a samurai…

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ALL ammunition……is defensive ammo.
Do you think the military uses “special defense” ammo……?
Training, offensive, defensive……it’s all the same
Just….do like Uncle Sam and keep as much as you can stockpiled

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yes they do actually… any idiot knows this. they definitely aren’t using russian .223… and they even use cheaper ammo at the range during training… you can only carry so much weight so realistically having more than you can carry is extremely impractical for most people. now buying 1k good ammo and then as much cheapest available ammo is best so you get more training.

You obviously didn’t serve in the US Military……or perhaps you are an air soft commando.
Not sure where you got your information: thinking that they use different types of ammunition. There is no such thing as cheaper “training” ammo or defensive ammo or offensive ammo. You shoot the same ammo in training that you shoot on deployment missions.

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they even had us shoot rocket launchers that are actually 22lr… because duhh ■■■■■■■ crazy expensive to try and train using real ones… but naw idk what im talking about.

they even have had virtual ranges to save on ammo for over 15years… tbh the coolest ■■■■■■ video game if it was allowed to civilians they would line up to play

US Army, 20 years,….you can fake the funk with people who don’t know any better.

But your not fooling anyone who was in the military.

Closed.

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