[Boatanchors] Conelrad Alarm memories

[Normiehall@aol.com]

All of the traffic regarding Conelrad has been very interesting.  

Having been licensed since 1950, I remember well the requirement to monitor 
for a Conelrad alert.  Most of us just used an AM radio running at a very low 
audio level to determine that broadcast stations were on the air.  If the 
monitored station left the air, they would have transmitted a Conelrad alert 
announcement which included a tone of a specific frequency and duration.  
This helped to avoid shutting down if the station had an equipment failure!

The actual Conelrad stations were those that changed their frequency to 
either 640 or 1240 KC after receipt of the alert.  All stations in a given 
area were then controlled from a "key" station.  This station then caused the 
stations in it's area to go on the air and off the air in a manner to confuse 
their use by DF equipment in enemy bombers.  A friend and fellow employee, 
Verne Shatto, W6RJE, SK, was chief engineer of KERN radio in Bakersfield, 
California and that was our key station.  The system worked - sort of - but 
was a bit kludgy at best!

I have two Conelrad monitors, one is I think a Gonset and the other a 
Motorola.  The Gonset is very primitive but the Motorola which came out 
around 1962 or so was fairly sophisticated.  Both used 2D21 thyratron tubes 
to latch a relay on receipt of an alert.  No station I'm aware of was 
automatically shut down but, rather, manually either shut down or moved to 
their assigned Conelrad frequency and put under control by the key station 
over telephone lines.

73,

Norm Hall, W6JOD


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
The reason this message is shown is because the post was in HTML
or had an attachment.  Attachments are not allowed.  To learn how
to post in Plain-Text go to: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html  ---