Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesinnewcastl
Part of his job was to broadcast a signal derived from a microphone in the inner engine nacelle so that he would deny that frequency to the Germans.
I think that he said that he operated the Fishpond equipment.
He noted that the engines exhausts glowed brightly and would 'flame' frequently. He always wondered just how visible the aircraft were to the enemy.
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Apparently, this original location for picking up wideband jamming noise resulted in fairly rapid degradation of the microphone capsule with the sheer vibration intensity, it was, ISTR, relocated first to a place near the wing root facing the engine, then someone had the idea of fitting it in the transmitter power pack itself, the dynamotor racket presumably making a good enough broadband nuisance.
Fishpond sounds interesting to the point of fascinating- apparently, the first H2S operators would sometimes notice fleeting returns on their displays from aircraft in the vicinity (there was of course a good chance of them being hostile), so it was realised that the normally blanked signal before first ground return after the transmitted pulse was a potentially very valuable source of warning information and worth developing a separate display for.
It was said that bomber crews were sometimes aghast and horrified at just how visible the exhaust flares were when they fortuitously encountered other aircraft in the stream. Suppressor manifolding and overall shields were apparently developed, but someone calculated that they would add to weight and detract from performance sufficiently to mean more bombers would be needed for the same overall load and that the inevitable higher losses would cancel the advantages gained from fitting exhaust shielding in the first place. All very well for someone firmly ground-based to say, I suppose.... I used to live near Lossiemouth, where Shackletons (essentially the grandson of the Lancaster by way of the Lincoln) were based until the early 'nineties, when these flew low overhead in anything darker than twilight, the eight exhaust stacks were strikingly prominent as bright orange streaks.