[Milsurplus] tank radio skip?

[Bob Camp]

Hi

I won't argue the point that they may have tried. The story - at least 
in the version I heard claimed that they were successful in their 
efforts. It also claimed that they fed highly useful intelligence back 
to North Africa for an entire summer.

To me at least the story still sounds like wartime disinformation. We 
obviously had a number of intelligence resources we wanted to hide.

To your point the story probably was a lot more credible in 1943 than 
today. There simply was not enough long term data on this stuff at that 
point. The original VHF work on tropo layers was only done in the late 
1930's  (by the Germans, which since they used the same frequency band 
kept them a bit in the dark about some of the earliest British radar 
experiments) .....

	Take Care

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ

On Jan 30, 2005, at 6:35 PM, Joe Foley wrote:

> 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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