[R-390] NASA radio

[Flowertime01 at wmconnect.com]

Fellows,

NASA had lots of links to all the branches and at lots of sites. A lot of 
the stuff was secondary or back up links. A lot of it was just even logistics 
links. A lot of radio teletype as that got you a hard copy. You could do 
punch cards for logistic support. All kinds of links to get local weather from 
bases around the world looking out a day or two for launch or touch down. 

We are likely to find NASA used almost everything that was ever used by the 
military in some form as just part of their world wide communication web.

All kinds of frequencies were used in telemetry links in the test and 
mission launches. You never knew what would propagate, fail, or work well. So we 
can expect a lot of different receivers were used for the intercept of 
telemetry.

Just getting a good time mark from WWV was a mission. The R390's had a 
known delay time that had been measured beyond belief to keep standard clock 
time at military sites around the world. Why reinvent that just to get all the 
sites on a synchronized time tick. There were stock time bases / clocks, 
scopes, R390 receivers and antenna systems with known propagation delay times. 
Plus frequency fade and time of signal transit from WWV to sites were known. 

I imagine a lot of things were tried just looking at Doppler frequency 
shift. In time radar and lots of computation would give you a trajectory and 
speed. But real time a Doppler shift sound would likely tell you more about 
time and speed. You can count frequency shift in hertz. With a time tick you 
can analog real time compute speed and then plot distance over time on a paper 
graph.

All kinds of uses for special receivers with state of the art add ons as 
test instruments.

If you have one of these receivers or other equipment with some identifying 
markings do try to keep the history together. You not only own a really 
great article of American manufacture, you own a bit of world history. Someday 
we will haul these things into a 24 hour Vegas pawn shop and get respect.

Roger AI4NI</HTML>