[Milsurplus] Submini tubes.

[ersmar at comcast.net]

Mike:

     No specific mention of nomenclatured equipment was made in the book, but Parsons' work on the prox fuse, RADAR and as weapons officer on the Enola Gay took up much of the middle of the story.  I read the entire thing in two sittings last Christmas.  

     Kind of ironic, though, that the APS-13's antennas were half Yagis with folded dipole feeds on the side of the bomb casing.  Prof Hidetsugu Yagi never saw his invention in use outside of Japan other than for two P-P inter-island VHF links in the 1930s.

73 de
Gene Smar  AD3F


 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Mike Morrow <kk5f at earthlink.net>
> Gene wrote:
> 
> > For a good book on the developer of the proximity fuse and his role
> > in RADAR and the Manhattan Project (including of arming Little Boy....
> > ... read: Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the
> > Atomic Bomb by Al Christman.
> 
> Does he mention the use of four RT-34/APS-13 night-fighter tail proximity 
> warning radar sets on that bomb, modified to separate the operating frequencies, 
> in a two-out-of-four voting scheme to trigger the air burst at about 1900 feet?
> 
> The RT-34/APS-13 tail warning radar used to be very common in surplus.  The 
> Germans apparently quickly caught on to it and could use its transmitted signal 
> to locate the aircraft in which it was operating.  Thus the actual service life 
> of the system was short before it was withdrawn.
> 
> Mike / KK5F