OT: Archiving data/video/movies/photos/oral history

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Thu Jun 8 12:11:09 2000

> Actually the thing that made allied radar better than
> German during the war wasn't so much the magnetron,
> that as mentioned had been copied. It was the rotating
> beam on the screen. I don't know why they didn't have this,
> only that it did make a large difference in how effective
> the radar was.

Welll...I don't know about that. In the old days, most radarmen looked
atthe old-fashioned A-scope just as much as the PPI-scope. Because the
radar receivers were in general bad, noisy things, the gain tended to be
set at a sweet spot, so there was a lot, but not too much, noise (false
echos, sea return, general junk) on the PPI-scope. It really was just a
broad overview, so the radarman could make fast choices as to what to
examine out of the mess. The A-scope (or R-scope, if fancy) was then used
to verify the echo, get the range, and interrogate with IFF. Azimuth was
read from a compass repeater, generally built into the console.

The Germans lost the radar war because they grew cocky. In 1940 they had
the best, and thought that best would be good for many years. By 1942,
they were proven wrong, and had to make up for a couple of years of
stalled developement. They never had a prayer of catching up.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Thu Jun 08 2000 - 12:11:09 BST