Re: [IRCA] Mystery tone at 1610, 1020 and WWII

["Craig Healy" <bubba@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

True, but the California stations would be good for at least a few hundred
miles out, I'd think.  Maybe up to 700 miles in good conditions.  At some
point there would be a handoff to the Hawaiians.  Maybe a span of a thousand
miles in the middle?  And, at least some skywave would be there from either
CA or HI during that midpoint.

The question I have is of the problem of the RDF bearing being useless for
navigation to the point where they were lost.  I can see it if no reading
were there, but not when *something* was audible.

(shrug)  I just pull out the Magellan GPS these days..

What I will do it match the Ray Jefferson RDF bearing to some known stations
such as the 1500 in DC.  That will give a good idea how close the bearings
were on the 1610 effort.

Craig Healy
Providence, RI

> I'm no pilot, but it would seem a substantial portion of the trip would be
> by dead reckoning in the dark, especially at the outset, if condx were
> cloudy, with no way to determine if side winds were blowing them off
> course.  Pilots could determine side wind drift by viewing ocean wave
> patterns which would not be visible at night.  Also, even finding a signal
> from HI at the beginning of the trip would have been a given based upon
> distance.  Based on my  experience 30 years ago with a marine RDFin a 25'
> boat, I was glad to replace it with a maunal Loran A even though it was
the
> size of wall safe, and I only had to contend with 80-100 miles of ocean to
> cross.  There are fewer and fewer of these WWII era pilots left to even
> ask.  I have a neighbor who navigated a B-24 for the Mighty Eighth during
> WWII.  I'll see what he says, although they flew during the day.  W2DU,
the
> author of the article in QST, is 85 years old.

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