"Calif Bill" wrote in news:UUq5h.5847$ig4.1408
@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net:

Loved TACAN. What a brilliant idea originally. Was a USAF TACAN tech.
Never worked on them much, as they worked well and was mostly an ILS
guy
until later when worked on airborne radars on transports.



The old ships had URN-3 from the Korean War. It worked great, but noone
could ever convince the idiot Navy the damned thing WASN'T channelized
and autotuning so they wore out its klystron screws and cavity tuners
jumping from channel to channel every time it went to sea.

The carriers and new ships had AN/URN-20s, both the single version and
the dual redundant version on the the carriers 20V2.

The contract we had was to verify the field changes and install any that
had not been accomplished, but that changed when I reported to the
contracting officer the deplorable condition I found on every ship,
starting in Norfolk. The lowliest ET3, just out of school, was tasked to
fix it, even on the carriers, and he just didn't have the training or
microwave understanding it takes to repair and properly tune a 3-screw
klystron. Hell, in school they taught him transistors. So, not the most
desirable piece of equipment in the shop, it went broken for long periods
as their better techs had more important jobs to accomplish. I got
called on the carpet in my boss' office to explain why the contracting
officer was calling him, as I was out on the road when it was the
contracting officer who called me, learning of its plight. Once I doused
that fire, still holding my job, I called the contracting officer back
and talked him into expanding my job to include incidental repairs, using
ship's stores and filing 2-kilos and doing a little training for the poor
ETs. That was some SERIOUS money and the company was thrilled, gave me a
nice piece of the action and a nice promotion for my trouble. The job
got longer and I worked the TACANs on every ship from Maine to Texas
before it was over. I loved to work alone or with one other guy out on
the road on per diem..(c; When I left the ships, they were radiating
something some couldn't remember radiating.

I caused quite a stir on the Eisenhower at the dock. I had called CIC
and warned them I would be doing TACAN testing and they might hear the
TACAN failure alarm I'd just repaired go off in CIC and to ignore it.
Well, that didn't get properly communicated to the next guys in the
space, so when the horn went off they called out a full fledged fire
party to fight the blaze in the TACAN compartment, showing up in full
gear to find me standing there with the local oscillator injection
cable's BNC connector in my hand I'd just unplugged to simulate a
receiver failure in unit 1, which dutifully now switched seamlessly to
unit 2 and set off the horn to be misinterpreted in CIC because noone
ever heard it go off in its former state!....great fun. The fire drill
over, the Exec asked me if I would accompany Eisenhower on a little
offshore cruise before departing, having already called my office and the
contracting officer to thank them for the wonderful tech service I had
given Eisenhower. I never turn down a free cruise, especially now that I
got a stateroom, not sleeping with 380 other sweaty bodies in the bilge.
I bunked and ate with the air crews.

One morning I sat eating my breakfast and a LCDR sat across from me and
noticing my company jumpsuit says, "Were you the guy who fixed our TACAN
so well?" I was. "You know we're going to have to go test it properly,
right?", he continued, suspiciously. "I'm going to fly back to Norfolk
in the morning and come back in the afternoon. Care to come along?"
This honor, when I was a simpleton sailor was reserved for the sailor-of-
the-month and a great honor. If you've never been catapulted off a
carrier, you've missed the time of your life....(c; We lost the TACAN
signal at 12,000 ft just before we got to Richmond! He said he'd never
seen one go that far. I was just glad they had the old mechanical
antenna that could take full power, not that damned electronic disk that
exploded at 4KW peak power most of the ships were getting. The morning
we left, I had her cranked up over 25KW Peak!...(c;...careful tuning,
careful tuning. I'll take any ride off a carrier, again, any time....

One potentially dangerous TACAN was in the USS Adams I'll never forget.
TACANs had this little mechanical wheel to send out their Morse ID to any
pilots who could still read a Morse ID. I was prechecking Adams' URN-3
and my ham radio ear caught "NF" as its ID. I quickly shut down the
transmitter and called radio to see what it was SUPPOSED to be
transmitting. NF is the TACAN call for Norfolk International Airport's
TACAN. Lucky for the Navy, all the military TACANs receiver-transmitter
splits is UPSIDE DOWN from the FAA TACANs. The ship TACANs have upside
down frequency pairs.

Great job. Too bad it didn't last. Unhappy pulling wire in my next job
with the company, I decided to take the job back in calibration with the
Charleston Naval Shipyard, which had the potential for a little more job
stability than working for the contractors and being laid off every
couple of years, a fine job well done rewarded. That was '81. Of
course, some idiots decided to close the shipyard around '89 so that
didn't last much longer, either....(snif)

Another company I worked for, EIL Instruments, had some FAA contracts I
dragged a mobile office trailer from job to job. In NC, I was scheduled
to calibrate their ILS Test Set, a receiver you put on a post and held on
centerline to check the audio tones balances on the ILS. The first one I
did, they brought me this old test set and I cal'd it, sealing the screws
to prevent tampering because you could easily see the set pots were all
worn out from someone screwing the adjustments to get it to read what
they wanted to report. Took it to the runway at Charlotte, ILS was xx
left-of-center, out of tolerance. The **** hit the fan and I was told I
was crazy and didn't know what I was doing. I think it must have created
a paper monster. The very next day, the FAA test airplane did its test
run on the ILS and it FAILED by exactly what my measurement had
predicted! Soon, I had NEW ILS Test Receivers showing up at the mobile
lab for my adjustment with orders from the NC Sector chief to make sure
noone could tamper with the settings any more. Previous contractors had
screwed everything all up and I had to live that down for quite a while.

The finest job in the entire government is a little ol' VORTAC in the
country. I got to visit and cal a lot of them. You're right about their
TACANS and old VORs. Some hadn't failed in years! I think it was the
tubes. I have a 1939 Motorola 41D AM portable radio. It has never had
anything replaced in it, including all the Motorola-labeled tubes!
Unable to get 90V 'B' batteries for it, I made a string of 9V alkaline
batteries clipped in series to get around 90V under load (3.2ma).
Filaments are powered by an Alkaline D cell in a Radioshack holder.
Works great since 1939!

Larry
--
Halloween candy left over.....
Is there a downside?