[ARC5] What did they talk to??

[Mike Hanz]

AirRadio wrote:

>  I will agree with David on these points as an exgirlfriends' father
>  was a radio operator on Wellington bombers in the RAF during the war,
>  They used exclusively HF the whole time and it wasn't until right
>  near the end of the conflict that the VHF scr-522 came along, Some
>  aircraft were fitted with them but mainly trainers (Harvards) and
>  'local to airport' craft. To use the scr-522 and have repeaters is
>  absurd as there would have to be repeaters in occupied territory and
>  therefore not feasable. The other point is that I personally have not
>  come across any vhf set made for 'production' aircraft that was
>  manufactured before 1943.


If I have learned one thing in the past twenty years getting mightily
confused with the history of this stuff, it is that one needs to caveat
surmise, speculation, and anecdotal evidence with a time stamp, theater
of operations, class of aircraft, military Service involved (e.g., Navy
or Signal Corps/USAAF) and country of aircraft origin.  Max's examples
above are suitably constrained and no doubt accurate for a specific
cross section within those five dimensions.  There is a certain amount
of risk in extrapolation of such snapshots to the entire period of conflict.

In the Pacific theater, the Navy was using VHF long before the USAAF.  
They dragooned WE-233As into service whose design Pan American had
commissioned in 1939, not bothering to place a Navy tag on them - fairly
common Navy practice in that era.  They did ultimately nomenclature them
the AN/ARC-4 when the JAN system came into being, but I have both 233A
and ARC-4 manuals in the library that reflect an apparent coexistence
for quite some time.  The more capable AN/ARC-1 here in the rig is from
a 1942 contract.

I don't have a record for the AN/ARC-10 relay listed at the hereford mil
list (and I notice the picture is mistakenly of an ARC-102), but the
Navy used both the ARC-18 and ARC-28 as VHF relay systems with the ARC-1
for carrier groups in the Pacific.  See
http://members.cox.net/aaf-radio-4/ARC-18.html for more detail on range
and CONOPS.

73,
Mike