I don't know if any of you recognized the hand-wheel located in the radio room (Funkraum). Although you cannot rotate it in SH3, but in real life the hand-wheel was for rotating the bridge-mounted direction-finding loop. The receiver it was attached to was the Type T3PLLä38.

Before electronic security became an issue, i.e., "Loose Lips, Sink Ships", (early war) the merchant ships that had radiomen/telegraphers on board sent lots of H&W messages (Health and Welfare). The commercial (merchant) spectrum of the HF band were generally high-speed CW (22-35wpm), and they were extremely busy--talkative, regarding bills of lading, cargo, personnel inquires. The radiomen aboard the merchant vessels stood the same rotating 4 hour watches for a reason.

The shipping lines had their own freqs. with Net Control and sometimes when radio ops of various ships wanted to pass private traffic between each other, the ops would go up or down in freq a few kHz to reestablish commo just to BS. SIGNAL security was unheard of then...just as today...think a moment what you pass as traffic on your cellphones. :yep:

The main commerical freqs. were between 100 kHz and 1.5 MHz. The U-Boat funkers monitored enemy ship-ship signals; enemy commercial signals, and also the aforementioned loop for DF.

Today it's done with satcom internet.

shameless...