At the risk of drifting the thread even further away from filtering, you
might find the recently declassified issue of the Cryptologic Quarterly
issue devoted to analyzing the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 2-4 Aug 1964
of interest. It can be found at
http://www.nsa.gov/vietnam/releases/relea00012.pdf and has extensive
discussion of how intercepts were used to piece together what happened.
If you go to the main Vietnam page http://www.nsa.gov/vietnam/ and
follow the links (particularly the Release 1 and Release 2 message
links) you can see a lot of the declassified source documents.
Jack
Fred Jensen wrote:
How these threads do morph! I don't know about RCA MF's, but I can
attest to the extreme non-fragility of the Collins variety (and in
fact "everything Collins").
In the mid-60's, while in the USAF (1Lt), I commanded an airborne team
whose missions were to put mobile, hardened TACANS on various mountain
tops in undisclosed locations for 10-15 days. After getting down, we
got our equipment out of the C-130 using LAPES (Low Altitude Parachute
Extraction System). The gear was mounted on shock pallets, the A/C
made a low pass and, with a tail-hook apparatus, snagged a shock cable
we had erected on flimsy poles, and flew out from under the pallets.
Snap opening cargo chutes "landed the pallets," as the system
description quaintly said. Despite all the shock protection, "landed"
was really stretching the term, even for the guvmint.
The pallets always contained two KWM-2A's packed in aluminum
foam-lined cases which we used to communicate with our FOHQ south of
the 17th who coordinated the CH-3's to come pick us up when we'd run
out of JP4 for the generators. The tubes were packed separately, but
other than that, the 2A's were stock, ready to transmit. We did 24 of
these missions and I lost four troops, but we lost zero out of 48
-2A's. Collins also manufactured our A/G radios (can't remember their
nomenclature at the moment), and we never lost one of those either.
Unfortunately, our missions ended by lighting off thermite on the pile
of equipment ... burning up 48 perfectly serviceable, beautiful
KWM-2A's was really really hard for a ham, and I wondered if my ham
colleagues would ever forgive me.
I used an S3-line for years, and while I don't have it any more to do
an A/B test, based on my memory (a bit leaky these days), I think the
K2 IF filters will easily stand up to the mech filters ... and, unlike
the MF's, I can tailor the K2 filters as I wish.
I think someone suggested that the move from AM to SSB was driven by
the superior filtering that became available at the same time (please
forgive me if I got that wrong). Personally, I think it was VOX.
Re R390A's: The Wullenweber array and station at Clark AB in the
Philippines, operated by the ATDE ("Agency That Doesn't Exist"), used
390A's. I wasn't permitted to know for what.
Fred K6DGW
Auburn CA CM98lw
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