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[12.0] Equipment Quick Reference & Index

v2.1.0 / chapter 12 of 12 / 01 sep 22 / greg goebel

* This chapter provides a very quick summary list of the equipment mentioned in the text, with hyperlinks to the sections of the main text providing more detailed descriptions. Cross references to related items in the list are marked in italics.

Naming systems for World War II electronic gear are a little confusing. The British RAF and Army began with somewhat informal names, such as "AI" for airborne intercept radars, "GL" for gun laying radars, and so on. The Royal Navy had their own type numbers.

The US Army had the "Signal Corps Radio (SCR) designation, while the US Navy generally had two designations, one a letter code such as "FH" and the other a mark designation, such as "Mark 8". The letter code came out of the Navy Bureau of Ships, while the mark designation came out of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance. The whole matter was so confusing that in 1943 the services adopted the universal "Army-Navy (AN)" designation system, for example "AN/APS-4". The "Army-Navy" suffix does not necessarily mean that the gear was used by both services; it just means they used the Army-Navy designation system.

As several different militaries used type and mark numbers that are easy to confuse, this chapter gives such designations prefixed with an organization code, such as "RN" for "British Royal Navy", "IJA" for "Imperial Japanese Army", and "IJN" for "Imperial Japanese Navy".

Wuerzburg radar

[12.1] BRITISH / COMMONWEALTH RADARS
[12.2] OTHER BRITISH / COMMONWEALTH EQUIPMENT
[12.3] US RADARS
[12.4] OTHER US EQUIPMENT
[12.5] GERMAN RADARS
[12.6] OTHER GERMAN EQUIPMENT
[12.7] JAPANESE RADARS
[12.8] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

[12.1] BRITISH / COMMONWEALTH RADARS

* British / Commonwealth radars included:

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[12.2] OTHER BRITISH / COMMONWEALTH EQUIPMENT

* Other British / Commonwealth equipment included:

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[12.3] US RADARS

* US radars included:

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[12.4] OTHER US EQUIPMENT

* Other US equipment included:

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[12.5] GERMAN RADARS

* German radars included:

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[12.6] OTHER GERMAN EQUIPMENT

* Other German equipment included:

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[12.7] JAPANESE RADARS

* Japanese radars included:

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[12.8] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

* There's a certain sort of interest in writing a book on a fairly obscure subject like World War II radar. To be sure, it's a topic that relatively few people are interested in and would care to hear about, but it is a fun detective game to try to track down the information.

In addition, there's more to it than magnetrons and antennas. The development of radar was very much a story of "engineers at war", with the combatants locked in an exhausting struggle of measure and countermeasure where many lives were at stake. As the story shows, some of the engineers, like Alan Blumlein, were killed in the course of their work.

The other aspect of this story is of Anglo-American collaboration. The US and the UK have an odd friendship, marked by rivalries and culture clashes, but for all the bickering the radar story shows the two nations are as thick as thieves. I have tried to be even-handed in my treatment of the different nations in the story, not just the US and the UK but also Germany and Japan, pointing out strengths, and in all fairness failings, among all the combatants.

To be sure, as a Yank I can't escape some bias whether I know it or not, but it seems to me that there is a strong basis in fact for seeing, as this document does, American dominance in radar technology towards the end of the conflict. I make no apologies for this. The British were exhausted and the Americans simply had more resources to throw at radar. Yanks tempted to get smug about this, however, should remember that the Americans couldn't have got anywhere near as far as they did if it hadn't been for Winston Churchill's insistence on passing British technology across the Atlantic in 1940 -- not to mention the extraordinary cooperation received by the Rad Lab and RRL from the British TRE.

* Incidentally, one of the many annoying issues in putting this document together was units. I have a "metric first" policy in my writings, but even that didn't straighten out the issue of whether to use wavelength or frequency. I eventually decided that I found it at least useful for myself to use both, though it is admittedly a bit cluttered. This got a little strange for descriptions of radios, which are almost never described using wavelength, but I decided to stick with the convention of the rest of the text for the sake of consistency.

* Primary sources include:

Some websites were consulted as well. Most of them only provided small bits and pieces, not all of which seemed trustworthy, but a few proved useful. Good sites included "McMahon's Radars", a technical reminiscence of WW II radars; Steve Bragg's "SCR-584 Radar Tribute Page"; and particularly Dick Barrett's "Radar Pages", devoted to British air defense radars. Incidentally, all the Rad Lab volumes are still available, on compact disk. I did get my hands on it, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to wading through it.

* This document was originally built around notes from articles published in IEEE SPECTRUM in 1987. However, after I completed notes from these articles, I ran into Buderi's THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and used that to flesh out the notes greatly, and the v1.0 edition of this document owed much to Buderi's book. The section on the "Battle of the Beams" was mostly taken from an installment of the History Channel's SECRETS OF WORLD WAR II, with the appropriate title of THE BATTLE OF THE BEAMS.

The v1.0 version was fun to write, but the same could not be said of the v2.0.0 version. It was a major rewrite, almost three times the size of the original, heavily based on Brown's RADAR HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II. This book is a gold mine of information, but written in a style that can be only be politely described as "exasperating", providing bits and pieces of sometimes incomplete information that had to be sifted out and assembled. It was an exhausting effort and when I finally came back and polished it up into the v2.0.1 version, to no surprise I found a fair amount of fractured writing that needed fixing.

The SPECTRUM articles covered codes and codebreaking as well, but that turned out to be a topic unto itself, and is discussed in a separate online document. Other online documents discuss the V-1 and German guided munitions in detail.

The section on radio relays in this chapter had a personal interest to me. I did a hitch in the US Army Signal Corps in 1972 through 1975 as a radio relay operator, setting up and operating the well-known Canadian Marconi AN/GRC-103 VHF relay system, and later the AN/GRC-144 microwave relay system.

* Revision history: 

   v1.0   / 01 mar 00 
   v1.1   / 01 jun 00 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.0 / 01 feb 03 / Major rewrite, from 4 chapters to 12.
   v2.0.1 / 01 feb 05 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.2 / 01 jan 07 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.3 / 01 may 09 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.4 / 01 mar 11 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.5 / 01 feb 13 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.6 / 01 jan 15 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.7 / 01 dec 16 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.8 / 01 nov 18 / Review & polish.
   v2.0.9 / 01 oct 20 / Review & polish.
   v2.1.0 / 01 sep 22 / Review & polish.
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