[Milsurplus] VHF radar
Marty R's GI-stuff haunt
[email protected]
Sat, 14 Dec 2002 02:43:08 -0500 (EST)
Wm. I'd been quietly following the SCR-270 / vhf radar thread & doing
"yup - yup - yup" nods to the US int'l place in radar development thru
late '41.
Two unmentioned things came up on the "search radar theme."
One was an incident mentioned here about some new carrier just back to
Norfolk from sea trials in '46. The only radar that worked in the
fog-bank was a "old bedspring set" that had been retrofitted.
The captain dressed down the tech staff for their negligence -
unaware of water droplet effects on microwaves.
Next one. This was pic of new H S Truman sailing from, again, Norfolk.
There's an antenna platform behind and above the low bridge & right up front
is a huge, shallow rectangular box. Bet it's a fiberglass-enclosed
200mcs broadside array (bedspring antenna)
Hey the poor SCR268 was missed last week. Our 1st radar, the "searchlight
aiming set." This thing had separate TX and RX antennas & no TR swirch.
SCR270 used 1 antenna and a rube-goldberg .25 wave stub & TX tetrode
receive RF pre-amp to preserve the oddish main RX rf amp (1831?).
Sometime soon thereafter the TR switch was born. In fact, the biggest
surprise, supposedly, at German disection of a Beaufighter with 10cm H2S
radar was not the multi-cavity maggy, but the dang gas TR switch.
Talk's cheap.