[Milsurplus] Mystery Antenna

Tue Jan 27 23:41:43 EST 2015

>
And the faint vertical lines under the platform have to be damage 
to the photo is my guess.
>

 Examination of the photos dispells that idea. The lines appear in more than one picture, are nicely parallel, only appear below the platform, tilt at the same angle as the tower in all photos, and attachments can be made out at their endpoints. There even appear to be jumper loops from the whips to these. They are clearly real items captured in the photo, not merely photo artifacts or errors.

Wayne
WB4OGM

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Hensley <w5jv at hotmail.com>
To: Nick England <navy.radio at gmail.com>
Cc: MilSurplus QSLNet <milsurplus at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tue, Jan 27, 2015 1:00 pm
Subject: Re: [Milsurplus] Mystery Antenna

Nick, I saw a similar structure when I did some training on the USS Enterprise, 
CVS-12, TDY from my tin-can.  On a hunch I forwarded the picture to George 
Fredericks, a retired Navy Radio Technician.  See below.  Harbor Control 
circuits as well as NAVCOMSTA's always maintained watches on HF even after going 
UHF.
Doug

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 09:42:55 -0800
Subject: Re: Mystery Antenna
From: gefred08 at gmail.com
To: w5jv at hotmail.com

Yes, I am sure that is correct. The Navy needed a half dozen if not more HF 
whips on carriers. Due to flight ops and entering ports with low bridges they 
ended up defaulting to deck edge locations, at much better spacings, with a very 
simple counter balanced tilt over mechanism.  When tilted over they were 90 
degrees from vertical, and still somewhat usable. And much-much easier to 
service when tilted towards the flight deck. Washing insulators became a breeze 
also.  This photo depicts an attempt to have your cake and eat it too design.  
Objective was to never remove any of the whips from service especially off the 
coast of Vietnam, where flight ops reached rediculous levels by the late 60's. 
So they perched them all up on that post & platform arrangement. It did not work 
well in practice though. The view in the background is Victoria Peak and HK 
harbor BTW.  And the faint vertical lines under the platform have to be damage 
to the photo is my guess. Anyway, this must approach
  must have cost the radiomen & ET' s a lot of casualties. Transmitting out one 
antenna at high power could literally fry the adjacient transmitters' output 
circuits, let alone blow away any receivers in use (think transceivers like 
URC-32...).  Most importantly this cluster approach would be a tremendous 
generator of wideband EMI that had to drive both the radio and ECM folks nuts.  
So, not a very good approach, even with brute force filter banks to cope, etc.  
The shipboard Navy finally designed & successfully fielded a single broadbanded 
antenna & tuned filter technology that greatly improved the situation. And they 
usually placed it just behind the mack, which held the bridge etc.  But even 
with deck edge whips & broadbanded antennas, calming down HF receiver issues 
still rankled them until the SATCOM receiver hit the fleet. That UHF  receiver 
had up to 15 data channels, all 75 baud and directly usable on all ships with 
existing terminal gear, patching, crypto & tty in pa
 rticular. I know because I was on the big team that made that happen fleetwide 
in less than five years. It was a blast to go all over and solve these problems, 
especially after living them literally 24/7 on USS CAMP for years on end....

On Jan 27, 2015 7:15 AM, "Doug Hensley" <w5jv at hotmail.com> wrote:

George,
Take a look at the attached picture.  Is that antenna structure to the left an 
HF array of whips or what do you think?
Doug

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