[Milsurplus] (No) RTTY equiptment on WWII subs

[Mike Morrow]

I wrote:

>To my knowledge, WWII US submarines carried no RATT gear.

I use RATT rather than RTTY or TTY, since RATT is the Navy term.

Joe wrote:

>A ham friend of mine did a lot of wiring, radar installation, etc on the USS
>Pampanito, now a museum ship locatd in San Francisco, and told me it had TTY
>gear installed.   If you do a search on USS Pampanito Tour, a site comes up
>with a Quick Time movie tour of the sub.  Just click on the radio room and
>scroll a complete 360 degree view of such.  It shows a TTY setup.Down in the
>text, they describes every piece of radio gear installed, including the
>specs for it. 

That's a wonderful web site.  The radio gear is shown here:

http://www.maritime.org/radiocat.htm#radio .

It looks like they've done a great job re-creating the WWII configuration.

But...there is **NO** RATT gear shown or discussed on this Pompanito site.
The thing that looks like a RATT machine is the most classified device that
the sub carried:  The ECM Mark 2 cipher machine.  It is not a teletype, but
instead the US counterpart to the famous German Enigma machines, but much
harder to code break.

My dad, an Electrician's Mate on the USS Sawfish in WWII, told me that use
of this machine was the most closely guarded activity that ever took place
on board.

ECMs are extremely rare.  It is a fantastic item to have on a museum ship.
The curators must be very proud of it.  Too bad it's in the anti-military
cesspool of San Francisco.

I still maintain that RATT capability did not exist on US WWII subs, and
the Pompanito site supports that.

Mike / KK5F