[Milsurplus] tank radio skip?

[Joe Foley]

Yeah, but,.......

Bob, you're speaking from many years of learning and
experience, the same was not available in the early
'40's.

Consider what radio was like 20 years before that, in
1921, sparkgap and NO idea of what format the future
would hold, much less what they needed for equipment. 
Granted the theory was there but they didn't have the
equipment to put it into practice experimentally, much
less to work the bugs out of it for military use.

The anomalies you speak of just weren't known then,
they just might have tried a several-day session of
trying to pick up that transmission again based on a
one-time listening.

Now, I will grant you that there might have been a few
people who understood radio well enough to de-bunk the
whole scenario but they were few and far between and
were most likely VERY busy with other more important
things.

Joe

--- Bob Camp <ham at cq.nu> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I have no problem with accepting some very amazing
> propagation from 
> airborne platforms. The whole take off angle thing
> is potentially very 
> different once you are well off the ground (say over
> 100 feet). Also as 
> you get up to roughly 2,000 feet things like tropo
> ducting become a 
> possibility.
> 
> On the transmit end I think we have established the
> transmitters being 
> in the five or ten watt vicinity and running AM
> rather than FM. My 
> rough survey of commonly available SWL grade VHF AM
> gear in 1941 is not 
> terribly encouraging when it comes to sensitivity.
> Certainly I have 
> experienced VHF openings and on many of them
> sensitivity was not an 
> issue.
> 
> The question is not weather a single transmission
> could have been 
> picked up. I will concede that it could have
> happened. The issue is 
> weather enough transmissions could have been picked
> up over a long 
> enough period of time to make setting up a
> detachment to monitor them 
> worth while. Even with war time priorities it is
> hard to see things 
> getting monitoring and communications set up in
> anything less than 
> weeks. To be useful weeks or months of transmissions
> would have had to 
> be intercepted and relayed back to North Africa.
> 
> Having a wide open band come on a path in the many
> thousands of miles 
> range does happen. Having such a path come up
> regularly over say an 
> entire summer at a less than peak point in the
> sunspot cycle still 
> seems a bit much. Typical long haul openings seem to
> be a one day 
> affair and then not much for a couple of weeks.
> 
> It would be nice to believe this happened (good old
> ham radio know how 
> sort of thing). It just seems to be a bit past what
> seems likely ..
> 
> 	Enjoy!
> 


		
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