Yes, the SSB was reallll fun 🙂
Everytime we park we turn off the engine, and so we turn off the transmitter (as it takes a lot of power to run and in the first day we exhausted the batteries by leaving it on for about 15 minutes). And the comms officer made it a habit to do a comms check by SSB every two hours. Of course no one but us even had the freaking thing on !! And we, the only suckers, when ever we wanted to answer, had to turn off the whole device, turn on the transmitter and receiver then wait two minutes for the prehistoric monster to warm up and only then can we answer – by that time the comms officer is probably pulling out what little hair he has left 🙂
It also took me a few hours to figure out this routine…

Regarding ש”ב ? who cares – SSBs are ancient history, there’s no real news in it and I took pains not to photograph the more interesting stuff 😉 ..