[Milsurplus] F4F versus F6F (fighter plane radio)

[Hue Miller]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chuck Mabbott" <aa8vs at yahoo.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: GB> F4F versus F6F


> I have watched Tora, Tora, Tora and several other war
> type movies.  
> 
> They have a veiw in cockpit of a Japanese plane and
> the fellow was dialing around a simplisitic looking Tx
> wonder what the band capabilities it had or was in
> primarily a couple of fixed freqencies, any comment?
> 
> Our fighter planes did not have a wide spread HF
> capabitiy did they?
> 
> 73 Chuck AA8VS

Probably more of interest to the Milsurplus list and i will fwd a copy there.
The main thing about fighter plane radio is that it should require no intervention from
the pilot. It should be set on a channel, or selectable channels, and forgot, except
for maybe a volume control.  The US fighter planes either used a couple "Command
Sets" radios or a VHF crystal controlled radio like SCR-522 or ARC-1. In either case
there was no pilot tuning around of the dial. I don't think the fighters even carried an LF
beacon receiver, but i may  be wrong.

Sources of info on the Japanese planes are sketchy and it seems sometimes there
are also more than one possible radio for the same plane. If you look at the Zero 
fighter antenna mast, you can see that the wire from it to the tail is REALLY short for
an HF antenna. Japan did have some 30 - 50 MHz aircraft radios; perhaps this was
used in SOME Zero fighters. Sometimes you will see a photo of a Japanese (single
place ( one pilot only ) ) aircraft with an antenna mast in FRONT of the cockpit. The 
wire ran from this to the tail. In this case, this means an HF radio. Judging from what
publications there are, ONI manual on Japanese aircraft ( "Office of Naval Intelligence" )
and a Monogram publication of a few years back "Japanese Cockpit Interiors", there 
were very few Japanese aircraft radios with either fixed quartz channels or a mechancal
system to pre-set the channels. In civilian flying of the 1930s this was routine, i guess
you had to tune the receiver around til you were able to hear the airfield on its HF 
channel. I wonder how practical this would be, however, for a pilot in a Japanese fighter
plane. Maybe that scene from the movie is not so unrealistic. I haven't seen it; i will
have to, and maybe freeze frame the radio scene and check whether it's realistic or
most surely likely, some US set.  I have somewhere a military newsletter with an 
interview with a former Japanese pilot who says "we" took the radios out of our planes
because they just didn't work very well anyway. Maybe it had something to do with 
the inability to lock them on frequency as well as the low power, about 10 watts input.
Now as to Pearl attack, i read one article that claimed that the radio transmitters on
the attacking planes were "sealed". I don't know what that means.  Certainly they were
ordered to maintain radio silence til reaching the target. Maybe the "sealed" just refers
to something like a paper reminder tag over the controls - something like that. We 
know the radios weren't disabled because the Japanese pilot who landed at Nihau 
Island in the Hawaii group after the attack, tried to use his radio to call for rescue. That
was of course a useless exercise: for one thing, a low antenna just a few feet off the
ground, plus low power A.M., would just not go very far; plus the fleet could not be
expected to divert a ship or risk trying to land a seaplane in the area just to rescue one
flyer.
Saburo Sakai ( sp? ), the Japanese fighter ace, made a hundreds of miles return flight
to his base, almost miraculous, wounded, with blood and glass in his eyes, apparently
just visual and compas navigation,  no voice comm radio or beacon receiver whatsoever.
-Hue