Steve Thrasher wrote in
:

Larry wrote:

Which tender? I was aboard Everglades (AD-24) out of Charleston from
1966- 1969.

USS Arcadia (AD-23) out of Newport. Probably from 1966 to 1967, went
to USS Talbot (DEG-4) at that point until 1969.

What radios did you have?

On the Arcadia I was "allowed" to work on greeks, GRC-27, since nobody
wanted to work on them and I was junior. Funny thing is that when I
described it to my dad...he told me that they used that radio on their
bomber in WWII. Once I was sent over to work on some kinda gizmo on a
can...grabbed the manual and spent about an hour reading it to finally
figure out it was a fax machine! Worked off of a receiver, metal
coated paper...motorized roller...sparks...ozone...fun! I'd never
seen a fax machine before.
On the second ship I worked on just about everything the ET shop was
responsible for, typical...nobody really specialized, whoever was free
went and worked on whatever was broke.

Ah, a fine old ship. I remember her. Roger the Greek 27. I was a cal
tech ET-1598, but I was the resident expert on AN/URC-9 UHF transceivers.
I still have my sheet-metal-capacitor-plate bending tools! I can make a
9 honk out its 10 watts all across 225-400 Mhz, a real feat on URC-9
transmitters...(c;


We couldn't make Europe with that equipment...(c;

Something similar happened to us. We were running down to Puerto Rico
and couldn't raise anyone on the HF. We could hear them calling us.
Finally fired off this old LF xmitter in aux radio (something Dr.
Frankenstein would have loved...final tube was about 12" tall and
soldered in place...had a 120-150lb AC motor to drive the 120-150lb DC
generator for xmit power, had a metal plate inside the cabinet saying
that it was made in 1940) anyhow...they cranked out a slloooowwww
morse code message that was relayed by Rota back to the rest of the
world telling them we were still afloat.


You are referring to the TBK on HF and the TBL on LF/MF! We had two TBKs
and one TBL with trunk conductors in the overhead to long wires fore-aft
between the forward mast and the after king post on Everglades, one for
each transmitter, plus a spare. The final tube wasn't SUPPOSED to be
soldered in place. The big plate wire coming out the side and the grid
wire coming out the top should have gone to a couple of sturdy thumbscrew
post clamps near them. Someone must have broken the porcelain insulator
they were mounted on and never replaced them.... Your power supply must
have been modified at some point with that AC motor. The completely
original TBK/TBL installation in Radio 2 on Everglades had a compartment
behind the main compartment where the M/G sets were mounted on racks.
The little TCS power supplies were also smaller M/G sets in that
compartment. The main drive motors for the transmitters were 115V DC
motors through DC contactors and ran off the ship's steam-powered DC
generators, circa 1952, down in the main engine room behind the reduction
gears. There were 2 DC steam-powered generators as our deck winches were
also archaic and DC operated. If I had both generators running, had all
three transmitters fired up and tuned for maximum output, I could drop
the steam pressure on the main plant by a few pounds when both governors
to the steam turbines in the generators opened up!....(c; That's serious
power! Power is our FRIEND! On a foggy night, I could also fire up the
TBL and make the air glow around its longwire...(c;

The Morse output was limited by how well you had the keying relay in them
adjusted. I could get about 35 wpm out of ours, but there was a decided
chirp on the air above 20 wpm as the load wiggled the main VFO.

There was an LM-21 heterodyne frequency meter hooked to all of them to
set their transmit frequency, but I had some welder buddies come weld me
a rack that a HP 5245L freq counter fit nicely into between the TBKs with
a little rotary coax switch so I could read the frequency directly. The
counter also had a freq standard cable going into the cal lab's primary
frequency standard next door, so the counter was as dead on freq as it
could be aboard. I used to tell the test operators astonished by how
close I could bring the TBKs up on a frequency that my LM-21's crystal
oscillator standard was freshly calibrated. 20 Hz off frequency was
simply unacceptable...(c;

Nice to meet someone from Arcadia. AD duty was great duty. I
wallpapered the cal lab with ships' plaques over our custom-framed kudos
letters from destroyers all up and down the East Coast and the Med. The
Admirals who used to trapse through just loved our "decor" and were so
interested in reading the plaques, they forgot to inspect the spaces,
giving us a string of "outstanding" ratings. CRUDESFLOT 6 and my captain
just beamed they were so proud of EAT's lab....(c;

They had TVs on my Everglades Cablevision system, too!