[time-nuts] B-1B bomber time reference

Peter Bell bell.peter at gmail.com
Fri Dec 14 14:46:24 UTC 2012


It was certainly one of the very first radios with it - but there was also
a non HQ version (the most obvious sign was that the synthesizer slice just
had "Synth" rather than "Synth/ECCM" on it.   The RAF in the UK had a bunch
of them and wanted to modify them to HQ spec for interoperability - the
reason for the "special" timing box was that the one the USAF were using
was based on a military spec GPS receiver that was a much bigger export
problem than the HQ radios were.  I also have a vague memory that although
the actual GPS would work in a degraded mode if it didn't have current key
data the TOD output just turned off because it could no longer decode the
corrections for SA and the designers had decided that possibly wrong was
worse than nothing at all.

Thinking about this stuff makes me feel old (looks at his phone with a 40
channel parallel tracking GPS/GLONASS receiver in it).



On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Bob Camp <lists at rtty.us> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Ummm…… errrr….. wasn't the ARC-164 the original HAVE QUICK radio? They
> certainly came out in both HAVE QUICK I and HAVE QUICK II versions.
>
> Yes, that was 30 years ago….
>
> Bob
>
> On Dec 14, 2012, at 1:24 AM, Peter Bell <bell.peter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > One of the very first time related projects I was involved in was for
> > synchronizing radios - this was when they were retrofitting HAVE QUICK to
> > the AN/ARC-164 and wanted a cheap, portable source of TOD data - the GPS
> > was a 2-Channel Magnavox unit (C/A code only) and they also did the
> > firmware modifications to generate the right data format (STANAG 4246?) -
> > so basically all that was left was putting them into a box with battery
> > backup.
> >
> > Wow, that was more than 20 years ago - I guess I'm getting old...
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