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The Early War Searching, Analyzing Recording Creating the Fog of War The wartime series More power, please Prototypes AN/ARQ-11 AN/APT-4(XA-2) |
The Year of Desperation Pressing commercial equipment into airborne service as a stopgap, the Services began developing procedures and processes using what was available. These were mostly heavy ground sets which needed shock mounts added to withstand an airborne environment, and required a lot of manual tuning and adjustment in their use. The Surveillance and Analysis Equipment While using commercial equipment provided a quick capability, the Services rapidly began developing A/N nomenclatured equivalents, then more specialized hardware as the German and Japanese radars became more sophisticated. Explored here are the common sets used to detect, geographically locate, and classify signals of interest. Recording Equipment Actually a specialized subset of the surveillance and analysis category, this page illustrates the more common recording equipment that formed an important part of the capability. Jammers It took quite a while before American aircraft commanders would trade bombs and bullets for radar jammers. Predictably, once the combat survival numbers started rolling in from both the European and Pacific Theaters, pilots were asking if more than one jammer could be installed on their plane! Prior to that, jammers were largely the realm of ferrets or single mission aircraft. Shown here are a variety of AM and DSBRC jammers used against different target radars. Some Rare Birds The search for higher power and rapidly changing mission requirements often produced very limited runs of a particular type of equipment. Shown here is one of AIL’s initial forays into countermeasures equipment with a 1,700 watt airborne power oscillator, and a rare prototype of a 150 watt magnetron jammer reaching down to 2 meters! |