[Milsurplus] RS-6, and vet memories

[Mike Morrow]

Hue wrote:

>I'd be real surprised if the U-2 pilot had anything other than a URC-4
>or URC-10.

Or maybe a URC-11.  Does anyone know when the URC-11 came in to service?  Some were being surplused in the early 1960s, and 73 Mag had a conversion article on it back then.

>I doubt if 1 pilot in 100 could copy 5 wpm...I also suspect only a
>minority of crewed aircraft radiomen could do 20 wpm...

I've seen somewhere a WWII USAAF bomber radioman's memoirs which admitted to about 12 wpm as typical skill level.  

>This also shows the problems in doing vet interviews if one hasn't done
>some research prior.

That is a point well taken.

For example, I've worked with several Vietnam-era Army Security Agency vets who did not know each other but independently told me that were trained by the ASA to copy at least 100 wpm (!?!) Morse.  It turns out that in reality they were trained for 100 *characters* per minute, not words per minute.  That's 20 wpm, and quite a simple achievement compared to beating the world's Morse record by a significant margin.  So most of the detail was remembered correctly except for one key word. 

I've found myself a victim of the same fuzzy memory syndrome.  I spent four years as a officer on a ballistic missile submarine more than 25 years ago, and was intimately familiar with most details of ship operation.  Yet today if you asked me for many technical details I'd likely do worse (in many areas at least) than what a Google search of the internet would provide.  I sometimes find in my "achives" a few notes or papers that I wrote while aboard several of the ships on which I was stationed, and I find that the info I wrote back then might just as well have been written by someone else...I'd totally lost the info from memory.  But I remember a heck of a lot of non-technical "sea stories" very well!

73,
Mike / KK5F