[Milsurplus] B17 ant

[CL in NC]

The pics do not come through on digest mode for emails, so since one fellow mentioned the AN104, thought I would chime in.  This was the VHF ant for the SCR522.  There was also a standoff insulator that looks like a mini AN104 that passed the HF wire out the fuselage to the tail and was normally for the SCR radio gear.  The trailing wire was for the BC375, but the G model B17 had a 3PDT knife switch that appears to switch the SCR and BC375 to either the trailing wire or the tail wire.  The AN104 was a blade shaped piece of wood, hollowed out with a 1/4 wavelength wire run up the hollow, the SO239 connector on the bottom was hooked to that vertical wire, and ground/shield went to a metal band that mounted with screws or rivets to the fuselage.  There were simple wood screws from the band into the wooden blade, and the area was smeared with some form of weather proofing.  There was also a whip out the bottom for the IFF, and also a short center fed dipole on the bottom for the 75Mhz. marker beacon receiver.  A lot of this changed from model to model, and field modifications were not uncommon.  Each position in the aircraft also had a selector switch which allowed any crew member, in addition to intercom function,  to talk over the liason set, the BC375, and listen on the BC348, but only pilot, co-pilot, and navigator could talk over the SCR in addition to the liason, along with intercom to each station.  The smallest unit on the plane, the intercom set, seems to has the most complicated interplane wiring compared to any other system on the plane.
Charlie, W4MEC in NC