[Boatanchors] New Osterman book (so far)

[Jim Haynes]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2014, Ron Bussiere via Boatanchors wrote:
> My 'favorite' receiver so far... Is the GE XW-1 (AN/FRR-48). Never heard 
> of it? No wonder. It had 50 (!!) tubes and 6 diodes. Back in 1962, it 
> only reached the prototype stage for the U. S. Force. It looks like a 
> National NC-303 on steroids. It's specs said it did everything except 
> for making breakfast......

John Costas of G.E. was a proponent of double-sideband suppressed-carrier
AM.  His paper on the topic, along with pictures of the equipment, was
in Proceedings of the IRE.  "Synchronous Communications" in ProcIRE
December 1956, reprinted in Proceedings of the IEEE in August 2002.
Also a paper in IRE Transactions on Communications Systems with the
same title in March, 1957.  And a lighter weight article "Synchronous
Detection of AM Signals" in Tele-Tech, July 1952.

I assume G.E. was trying to sell the Air Force on DSBSC while Collins
was selling SSB.  Costas' argument is basically that while DSB takes
twice the bandwidth of SSB the two sidebands add coherently so you can
use half the transmitter power.  And as a bonus you can receover the
exact carrier frequency, whereas with SSB you are dependent on the
accuracy of oscillators to get the carrier frequency close enough for
good intelligibility.  It seems that SSB won the battle; perhaps it
really was superior operationally, or perhaps the friendship of
Art Collins and Curtis LeMay had something to do with it.

In my limited knowledge prototype equipment like that was surplused
as soon as the experiment was over.

Jim W6JVE>