"Eisboch" wrote in message
...

"Jim" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Jim" wrote in news:lh85h.5372$ig4.890
@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net:

You are welcome
Jim ETR3


Which radars? Our rate is pretty much toast these days....

Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

SPS 10, SPS 37, Repeaters and IFF. I think I got the numbers right.
Jim


Want to feel old? I think the current AEGIS type radar is called an
AN/SPS-49.
Seems like I also remember an AN/SPS-6. I think it was an air search
radar.

Eisboch
We also had the SPS 6 or 8 whatever, and a SPS 30. The 30 looked like one
of those old fashioned satellite dishes on steroids. It could see out about
250 miles, I believe. Ah the good old days.
Jim

"Jim" wrote in message
k.net...

"Eisboch" wrote in message
...

"Jim" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Jim" wrote in news:lh85h.5372$ig4.890
@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net:

You are welcome
Jim ETR3


Which radars? Our rate is pretty much toast these days....

Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

SPS 10, SPS 37, Repeaters and IFF. I think I got the numbers right.
Jim


Want to feel old? I think the current AEGIS type radar is called an
AN/SPS-49.
Seems like I also remember an AN/SPS-6. I think it was an air search
radar.

Eisboch
We also had the SPS 6 or 8 whatever, and a SPS 30. The 30 looked like one
of those old fashioned satellite dishes on steroids. It could see out
about 250 miles, I believe. Ah the good old days.
Jim


Hard to believe that the 6kw Furuno that was on the Egg Harbor had a 60 mile
range and probably better resolution.

Eisboch

"Jim" wrote in news:lZo5h.5223$l25.1892
@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net:

SPS 10, SPS 37, Repeaters and IFF. I think I got the numbers right.
Jim



We had an SPS 10 Pathfinder for surface search and a real antique SPS-6 for
air search. They finally decided the 6 was eating our budget and never
served a useful purpose as we were an AD with two 3" guns who couldn't
shoot down a Cessna and removed it. I kept the mount for the ship's TV
antenna system, tied into the gyros so you could keep it pointed at the
shore stations even if the ship turned...pretty neat, actually...(c;

No TACAN to go with the IFF? I was a TACAN tech working for a couple of
contractors for years....a great job...



Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Jim" wrote in news:lZo5h.5223$l25.1892
@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net:

SPS 10, SPS 37, Repeaters and IFF. I think I got the numbers right.
Jim



We had an SPS 10 Pathfinder for surface search and a real antique SPS-6
for
air search. They finally decided the 6 was eating our budget and never
served a useful purpose as we were an AD with two 3" guns who couldn't
shoot down a Cessna and removed it. I kept the mount for the ship's TV
antenna system, tied into the gyros so you could keep it pointed at the
shore stations even if the ship turned...pretty neat, actually...(c;

No TACAN to go with the IFF? I was a TACAN tech working for a couple of
contractors for years....a great job...



Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

Loved TACAN. What a brilliant idea originally. Was a USAF TACAN tech.
Never worked on them much, as they worked well and was mostly an ILS guy
until later when worked on airborne radars on transports.

"Jim" wrote in
k.net:

The 30 looked like one
of those old fashioned satellite dishes on steroids. It could see out
about 250 miles, I believe. Ah the good old days.


The 30 was an interesting beast on S-band, I think. If you pointed it at
the moon and kept a pulse generator on the repeater to keep it sweeping
past its range, you could actually measure the distance to the moon by
counting the sweeps X range plus wherever the moon showed up on the last
sweep with the sweep set as far out as it would go. The 30 ran so much
power you had no trouble seeing the moon's reflected signal...(c; It would
cook a seagull that had the audacity to fly right in front of it out of the
air for several hundred yards in its narrow beamwidth.

Did you ever see someone slew the 30 antenna too fast and rip off the
mounting bolts? BIG drive motors, heavy antenna...(c; It could actually
make the ship it was on change course a tiny bit....

Ah, magnetrons driving amplitrons and large klystrons.....POWER IS OUR
FRIEND! Wonder how many of us it cooked with its Xrays leaking out of the
rectifier cabinets?

Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

SPS 10, SPS 37, Repeaters and IFF. I think I got the numbers right.
Jim



Eisboch wrote:
Want to feel old? I think the current AEGIS type radar is called an
AN/SPS-49.

Nah, SPY-1

Cool name, huh?

The SPS-49 is a planar array air search radar IIRC.

Seems like I also remember an AN/SPS-6. I think it was an air search radar.


Beats me, I was an engineer.

Regards
Doug King ex-BT1(SW)

"Calif Bill" wrote in news:UUq5h.5847$ig4.1408
@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net:

Loved TACAN. What a brilliant idea originally. Was a USAF TACAN tech.
Never worked on them much, as they worked well and was mostly an ILS
guy
until later when worked on airborne radars on transports.



The old ships had URN-3 from the Korean War. It worked great, but noone
could ever convince the idiot Navy the damned thing WASN'T channelized
and autotuning so they wore out its klystron screws and cavity tuners
jumping from channel to channel every time it went to sea.

The carriers and new ships had AN/URN-20s, both the single version and
the dual redundant version on the the carriers 20V2.

The contract we had was to verify the field changes and install any that
had not been accomplished, but that changed when I reported to the
contracting officer the deplorable condition I found on every ship,
starting in Norfolk. The lowliest ET3, just out of school, was tasked to
fix it, even on the carriers, and he just didn't have the training or
microwave understanding it takes to repair and properly tune a 3-screw
klystron. Hell, in school they taught him transistors. So, not the most
desirable piece of equipment in the shop, it went broken for long periods
as their better techs had more important jobs to accomplish. I got
called on the carpet in my boss' office to explain why the contracting
officer was calling him, as I was out on the road when it was the
contracting officer who called me, learning of its plight. Once I doused
that fire, still holding my job, I called the contracting officer back
and talked him into expanding my job to include incidental repairs, using
ship's stores and filing 2-kilos and doing a little training for the poor
ETs. That was some SERIOUS money and the company was thrilled, gave me a
nice piece of the action and a nice promotion for my trouble. The job
got longer and I worked the TACANs on every ship from Maine to Texas
before it was over. I loved to work alone or with one other guy out on
the road on per diem..(c; When I left the ships, they were radiating
something some couldn't remember radiating.

I caused quite a stir on the Eisenhower at the dock. I had called CIC
and warned them I would be doing TACAN testing and they might hear the
TACAN failure alarm I'd just repaired go off in CIC and to ignore it.
Well, that didn't get properly communicated to the next guys in the
space, so when the horn went off they called out a full fledged fire
party to fight the blaze in the TACAN compartment, showing up in full
gear to find me standing there with the local oscillator injection
cable's BNC connector in my hand I'd just unplugged to simulate a
receiver failure in unit 1, which dutifully now switched seamlessly to
unit 2 and set off the horn to be misinterpreted in CIC because noone
ever heard it go off in its former state!....great fun. The fire drill
over, the Exec asked me if I would accompany Eisenhower on a little
offshore cruise before departing, having already called my office and the
contracting officer to thank them for the wonderful tech service I had
given Eisenhower. I never turn down a free cruise, especially now that I
got a stateroom, not sleeping with 380 other sweaty bodies in the bilge.
I bunked and ate with the air crews.

One morning I sat eating my breakfast and a LCDR sat across from me and
noticing my company jumpsuit says, "Were you the guy who fixed our TACAN
so well?" I was. "You know we're going to have to go test it properly,
right?", he continued, suspiciously. "I'm going to fly back to Norfolk
in the morning and come back in the afternoon. Care to come along?"
This honor, when I was a simpleton sailor was reserved for the sailor-of-
the-month and a great honor. If you've never been catapulted off a
carrier, you've missed the time of your life....(c; We lost the TACAN
signal at 12,000 ft just before we got to Richmond! He said he'd never
seen one go that far. I was just glad they had the old mechanical
antenna that could take full power, not that damned electronic disk that
exploded at 4KW peak power most of the ships were getting. The morning
we left, I had her cranked up over 25KW Peak!...(c;...careful tuning,
careful tuning. I'll take any ride off a carrier, again, any time....

One potentially dangerous TACAN was in the USS Adams I'll never forget.
TACANs had this little mechanical wheel to send out their Morse ID to any
pilots who could still read a Morse ID. I was prechecking Adams' URN-3
and my ham radio ear caught "NF" as its ID. I quickly shut down the
transmitter and called radio to see what it was SUPPOSED to be
transmitting. NF is the TACAN call for Norfolk International Airport's
TACAN. Lucky for the Navy, all the military TACANs receiver-transmitter
splits is UPSIDE DOWN from the FAA TACANs. The ship TACANs have upside
down frequency pairs.

Great job. Too bad it didn't last. Unhappy pulling wire in my next job
with the company, I decided to take the job back in calibration with the
Charleston Naval Shipyard, which had the potential for a little more job
stability than working for the contractors and being laid off every
couple of years, a fine job well done rewarded. That was '81. Of
course, some idiots decided to close the shipyard around '89 so that
didn't last much longer, either....(snif)

Another company I worked for, EIL Instruments, had some FAA contracts I
dragged a mobile office trailer from job to job. In NC, I was scheduled
to calibrate their ILS Test Set, a receiver you put on a post and held on
centerline to check the audio tones balances on the ILS. The first one I
did, they brought me this old test set and I cal'd it, sealing the screws
to prevent tampering because you could easily see the set pots were all
worn out from someone screwing the adjustments to get it to read what
they wanted to report. Took it to the runway at Charlotte, ILS was xx
left-of-center, out of tolerance. The **** hit the fan and I was told I
was crazy and didn't know what I was doing. I think it must have created
a paper monster. The very next day, the FAA test airplane did its test
run on the ILS and it FAILED by exactly what my measurement had
predicted! Soon, I had NEW ILS Test Receivers showing up at the mobile
lab for my adjustment with orders from the NC Sector chief to make sure
noone could tamper with the settings any more. Previous contractors had
screwed everything all up and I had to live that down for quite a while.

The finest job in the entire government is a little ol' VORTAC in the
country. I got to visit and cal a lot of them. You're right about their
TACANS and old VORs. Some hadn't failed in years! I think it was the
tubes. I have a 1939 Motorola 41D AM portable radio. It has never had
anything replaced in it, including all the Motorola-labeled tubes!
Unable to get 90V 'B' batteries for it, I made a string of 9V alkaline
batteries clipped in series to get around 90V under load (3.2ma).
Filaments are powered by an Alkaline D cell in a Radioshack holder.
Works great since 1939!

Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?

Jim wrote:
"Rick Hughes" wrote in message
...

"Jim" wrote in message
ink.net...
And thank you to all the veterans who have served our country. God speed
to our military heroes who are currently serving.
Jim


anything to say about boats ?

Ricky or Ospray or whatever your name is, You will need to apply for the job
of rec.boats net nanny and wait for a vacancy. Currently the position is
filled and our nanny shows no signs of being willing to step down.
Jim


Just that I thought this was rec.boats, and the idea is you talk about
boats. ... obvioulsy wrong.

"Osprey" wrote in message
oups.com...

Jim wrote:
"Rick Hughes" wrote in message
...

"Jim" wrote in message
ink.net...
And thank you to all the veterans who have served our country. God
speed
to our military heroes who are currently serving.
Jim


anything to say about boats ?

Ricky or Ospray or whatever your name is, You will need to apply for the
job
of rec.boats net nanny and wait for a vacancy. Currently the position is
filled and our nanny shows no signs of being willing to step down.
Jim


Just that I thought this was rec.boats, and the idea is you talk about
boats. ... obvioulsy wrong.

This is rec.boats. You are welcome to speak here on any topic, hopefully,
boating related. The conversations you find here are likely to be similar to
what you might eavesdrop on as you strolled down any dock. Often they are
boated related, but sometimes they are not. You are welcome to initiate any
conversation you wish or join into one that is on going. You are not welcome
to stroll down to the docks and tell folks what they shouldn't be talking
about. That would be rude.
I apologize for being short with you. I'm sure you just wanted to make a
boating comment or ask a boating related question.
Fire away.
Jim