Not exactly engineering

Here is an idea I had for a long while. As the title says it's not exactly about engineering. But this forum seems appropriate for it according to it's description.

You know how certain countries like the USSR fostered sports and shooting in the inter war periods and thus ended up with a large core of snipers? Well I was thinking of doing the same. But instead of focusing on marksmanship I would focus on that core ideal of warfare C&C.

The idea is simple. In the years immediately after the first world war radio telegraphy first made its grand entrance into Purpelian society. The Arch Prince Felix, heir to the throne than in his late 20's was a passionate radio enthusiast. And as often is with monarchies it's monkey see monkey do. The Arch Prince fell in love with the hobby and promoted it to his subjects. Adding to that there existed a large gap in the laws regarding radio traffic. More precisely there were no laws at all regulating it. This meant that radio became a voice of free and unregulated speech in the otherwise totalitarian nation. Together these two factors caused radio hobbyist to swell in numbers. And with them rose the factories and infrastructure to support them. And by the late 30's this resulted in Purpelia having a vast amount of men of fighting age who were well versed not only in using but also building and maintaining their own radio sets. As well as a large number of radio factories and substantial experience in their development.

You can see where this is supposed to go. As in a first rate C&C network with many, many skilled people coming out of the woodwork.

So, how would you rate it? Is it at all possible? Plausible? Realistic? Well thought out?

Fostering radio use is a good idea.

But radio =/= modern C&C. And I somehow doubt you can get people to do C&C things as a hobby.

But of course fostering general computer literacy is good, and would do you one better.

It's meant for the WW2 era. My end goal is to have a high level of skilled radio staff and high quality radio equipment throughout the war.

Sure it's not modern C&C. But in the day and age it's set in it would represent a great step toward making vintage C&C better.

HAM radios pre-WWII.

How big and expensive were radios then?

Snipers? Be best if you had a large agricultural population, they learn sniping on their own.

You could build crystal radio sets for pennies in the interwar period, especially pre-WWI (since the later part of interwar brought the wireless along, which killed off the crystal set for the following reasons). There was a lot of soldering to be done, and fine control of the volume, tuning dials and the aerial itself because the signal was so weak.
Part of the reason it was so weak however, was because the set itself was tiny and had one or two sets of headphones. The biggest part by far was the aerial, which was just a length of wire you jammed into the air.

Oh in this context this is super-reasonable.

>interwar radios
>how big and expensive were they
He asked, I answered.

The things were even supposedly built ad hoc by allied forces during the Normandy invasion, since they were banned from 'conventional' personal radios.

Crystal sets were very popular in the 20s and 30s, because of the cost of wireless sets (though factory-built sets weren't that cheap either). Your average newspaper had an instruction manual on how to build one with a box of scraps.
It's a perfectly relevant and actually probably suitable suggestion.

Wait, I actually have no idea if you're being sarcastic or not, Allanea.

I am not sarcastic.

In an interwar context, promoting radio use along with shooting sports, wilderness survival, skiing, parachutes and grenade-throwing among civilians was actually done.

A lot of this (in fact, all of it I think) was done by many nations IRL in the interwar period.

The USSR did it, for instance.

The Germans had a lot of pilot training in lieu of an air force.