Radio and Travel Inspired Ramblings

QUIC (for Quick Intercept Capability) Van, Cryptologic Technicians' home aboard ship.

R-1401 VLF/LF Receiver, 1 Khz thru 600 Khz. Tied into ships SONAR receiver IF

 One FUN thing I did while on a ship for a few months was to sit the CTR posit while they got Midrats. The CT team on a destroyer would only have 2 guys to copy CW (the CTR rating). They stood Port and Starboard watches (something like 4 hrs on, 4 hrs off), usually copying Russian ships checking into their ship-to-shore nets, or CW signals from local countries in Africa, some were police nets on CW. At sea I didn't have much to do unless some equipment broke, so being a ham that only used CW, I helped them by sitting their posit to give the ops breaks, once they taught me the format they used for copying all the signals on a mill. At night I would copy the Russian traffic on an electric mill for the op on duty so he could get Midrats, the other CTR would be sleeping.

    Otherwise my job was to babysit the gear and fix things, and teach new ops on their first trip how to operate the shipboard equipment. Most CT ops (CTO, CTT, CTI types) never saw that stuff at the shore stations. 

KW-7 TTY Crypto

 

KW-7 showing plugboard wires.  The wire jumpers were changed each day to implement a different encryption (and decryption) "key" combination.

 We got all the screw-ups on the TAD trips, they were sent out on the ships as punishment. Unfortunately it actually was my job to go TAD on the ships. We had a separate shop inside the big Wullenweber HFDF antenna array at Rota where we repaired and did PM's on equipment from the vans when they weren't on a destroyer.