[Milsurplus] item of interest - UK vs. USA VHF/UHF

[Mike Morrow]

>> The Brits were far ahead of us on VHF techniques.
>
>What is "far"?  To be honest, I do not think far was very far at all.
>At most, maybe two years.
>
>> Their  radar shows that.
>
>Do not sell the early US efforts so short - our first three radars
>(SCR-268, SCR-270/271, CXAM) were pretty good units when they started
>deployment in 1941.

For VHF comms, at least the US Navy had the W.E. 233 (AN/ARC-4) stop-gap VHF set.  Does anyone know what year the W.E. 233 first appeared?  But there are many pictures out there of WWII US Navy aircraft that have a SCR-522 installation, which was obviously superior the the AN/ARC-4 for most purposes.  I believe that the SCR-522 played a much more important role than did the ever-popular SCR-274-N.  Pilots reported much greater satisfaction with the four push-button channels of the 522 over the easily upset, not-easily netted to a transmitter, coffee grinders of the 274.  The 522 was a happy marriage of UK and USA talents in what was then called the UHF domain.

I think US development and deployment of equipment that operated above the range we today call VHF was state of the art for the last few years of WWII.  Here's a few randomly selected, but admittedly odd-ball, examples:

The mostly undeployed US Mark IV 450 mc IFF (SCR-515, ABA) was supposedly a better IFF system than the Mark III (SCR-595, ABK) and Mark III/G-band (SCR-695, ABF) 180 mc British-inspired systems that were in general use throughout the entire duration of the war in all theaters.

The USAAF's SCS-51 ILS system was a pretty piece of work too, using 330 mc glide slope (AN/ARN-5) and 110 mc localizer (RC-103) signals.  The system is still in use 65 years later.  It sure beat the USN's Air Track (ZA, ZAX) MF localizer, VHF glide path system.  I don't know if there was a competing British ILS in WWII.

The AYD, AN/ARN-1, and *AN/APN-1 altimeters, and the AN/APS-13 tail warning radars operated around 450 mc.  Once again, I don't know if there were British equivalents.  The nomenclature of the APN-1 has the star in it which indicates that the set was intended for use by the armed services of the US and allied nations.  I've heard that use of the AN/APS-13 was short-lived, after someone figured out that its pulsed 450 mc signal could be used by the enemy to detect the host aircraft.  That would make the most important role for the AN/APS-13 when four per bomb were used to trigger the air burst of each of the atomic weapons that ended the Pacific war.

I think that the Germans are sometimes given too much credit for techological innovation.  I would give them credit in areas that are essentially mechanical in nature.  In electrical/electronic technology, the UK and the US clearly outclassed the Germans in most areas.  Sure, the Germans converted early to low-band VHF for a lot of their air and ground force communications, but they stayed with AM while the US adopted for ground forces the FM standard that has been universal worldwide for 60 years.  (You've got to love that ugly, but historically extremely important, SCR-508.)  I have a few examples of WWII German airborne communications gear (part of FuG 10 and 16), and mechanically they are outstanding, but so was a lot of US gear of the era.  Electrically, the sets seem almost obsolete for their era.  Then, there was the failure of German science to recognize that airborne centimetric radars sets were in service on UK and US sub-hunting aircraft.  The Germans believed that such sets were a practical impossibility, and failed even to develope U-boat carried radar detection sets for such radars.   It's one of the reasons life became so difficult (and short) for U-boat crews (in addition to the US having recovered that Enigma machine from U-571...whoops, thats just a bad joke from a bad movie!).

IMHO, of course!

Mike / KK5F