SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Magnetic Anomaly Detection

Sniper297 · 09-21-16, 09:36 PM

I was an aviation ASW tech in the 70s, what we used then was smoke floats. ("MADMAN, MADMAN, smoke away" was the call when you got a wiggle on the trace, the button push simultaneously launched smoke and burned a circle on the automatic plotter) My guess is the aluminum slick was just what they came up with as a marker, a dye marker would have worked just as well. As for the satellites I never heard that, and would tend to doubt it - the disturbance in the magnetic field wouldn't be big enough to be detected from 10,000 feet, let alone outer space. And the claim that we knew where every soviet sub was all the time is patently ridiculous - even if you're tracking all the KNOWN subs, how would you know if there were unknowns or not?

Obviously we had choke points like the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gaps covered with SOSUS buoys, so if one of those picked up noise some P-3 Orions would be sent to investigate - at low altitude.

I was in a helicopter ASW squadron, more limited range than a P-3 so used mainly to confirm suspected contacts. With the ability to hover we could use the dip sonar to locate a MAD contact precisely.

Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King retracting the dip sonar.

Red and yellow thing on the far left is the MAD antenna, my buddy in the pic has his hand on a Mark 46 acoustic homing torpedo.

09-21-16, 09:36 PM	#18
Sniper297 The Old Man Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Philadelphia Shipyard Brig Posts: 1,386 Downloads: 160 Uploads: 19	I was an aviation ASW tech in the 70s, what we used then was smoke floats. ("MADMAN, MADMAN, smoke away" was the call when you got a wiggle on the trace, the button push simultaneously launched smoke and burned a circle on the automatic plotter) My guess is the aluminum slick was just what they came up with as a marker, a dye marker would have worked just as well. As for the satellites I never heard that, and would tend to doubt it - the disturbance in the magnetic field wouldn't be big enough to be detected from 10,000 feet, let alone outer space. And the claim that we knew where every soviet sub was all the time is patently ridiculous - even if you're tracking all the KNOWN subs, how would you know if there were unknowns or not? Obviously we had choke points like the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gaps covered with SOSUS buoys, so if one of those picked up noise some P-3 Orions would be sent to investigate - at low altitude. I was in a helicopter ASW squadron, more limited range than a P-3 so used mainly to confirm suspected contacts. With the ability to hover we could use the dip sonar to locate a MAD contact precisely. Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King retracting the dip sonar. Red and yellow thing on the far left is the MAD antenna, my buddy in the pic has his hand on a Mark 46 acoustic homing torpedo.