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Bruce in Alaska wrote in news:bruceg-
:

After that Krupp had run for a couple of weeks, all that water would
have been excited to steam and gone, if the Maggie lasted that
long......

In the 60's, aboard USS Everglades (AD-24), we were about 1/2 way across
the Atlantic headed for the wonderful Naples Sailor Resort when our
AN/SPS-21 Raytheon Pathfinder got more and more insensitive. It just
couldn't see a ship on the horizon we could see from the bridge below the
antenna!

I got hooked into finding the problem and when I pulled the waveguide off
the transceiver it looked like someone had flushed a toilet on the deck
of the little radar room. The waveguide leaked, bad. We found a joint
had been pulled apart, breaking the flange off the guide, not good.

Under the gun to get a picture back on the bridge, I went down to my cal
lab and reeled off a length of RG-213/U, some N connectors and stole a
couple of waveguide to coax adapters out of the cal lab microwave bench.
I put one adapter on the antenna and one on the transceiver then
tywrapped the 213 coax to the waveguide up the stick, about 35 ft to the
antenna base.

Holding my breath and praying it wouldn't arc madly, I flipped the
switch. Calling down to the bridge on the sound-powered phones, the RD
reported his image was perfect and he had a big target at 24 miles just
fine.

I think that coax was still on it when I was transferred off the ship a
year later....(c;

I never figured out why the Pathfinder didn't arc the little pin antennas
in the waveguide adapters, but it didn't. The old waveguide was all
eaten up inside from all the water in it. It must have been in there a
long time.