Quote:
Originally Posted by maillemaker
So during the war, subs got nailed whenever they used their radios, due to direction finding equipment.
I'm surprised that they did not event a throw-away floating radio transmitter that they could put their message in, throw overboard, and then, when they were far away, it would transmit the message and then sink.
Or, better yet, set up a floating transmitter and anchor it somewhere (or let it drift), while it transmitted from time to time, and then lie in wait and nail whoever steamed along to try and "sink" the "sub". In other words, use the transmitter as bait.
Steve
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So many technical issues make this thoroughly modern idea totally impractical in 1939-45.
- Vacuum tubes made radios large, heavy and expensive. They also required accurate frequency tuning and long warm-up times before they could transmit. Throwing one away every time a message was sent would be wildly impractical.
- As there was no solid state electronics, radios were prone to problems with moisture, as in sitting on a raft. There were emergency beacons produced but these could only send a homing signals on a single frequency and could not transmit a message.
- Solve the radio problem and the relatively poor state of storage battery technology of the day rears its ugly head. The sophisticated batteries needed for autonomous radio rafts used exactly the type of strategic materials that were in short supply in Germany. German remote weather stations actually demonstrate the OP's concept but they were big, unreliable and the message bank was extremely limited and repetitive. A U-Boat could carry only one and they required several hours and some several men to set up, tune and test. And they were set up on land.
- There was little high-frequency (HF) voice communication, HF was primarily by morse code. There were means of pre-recording morse traffic as typified by the teletype machine but these were very big and complex devices and used large amounts of electrical power for their operations.
- HF radio waves were bounced off the ionosphere so the antennas were long-wire's mounted horozontally, the so-called jumping wire on a U-Boat running from the conning tower to the forepeak carried the HF transmitting antenna. Mounting a horozontal long-wire antenna on a raft might prove difficult. Vertical VHF antennas for voice commincations were shorter and more familier in the here and now but still a bit of a novelty in WW2. Only the Allied navies, thanks to the USN's VHF Talk Between Ships (TBS) radios made extensive use of voice during the war and VHF was limited by the horizon and so strategically useless to the U-Boat waffe.
- Long-range HF traffic required certain atmospheric conditions and with a manually operated set, the operator had frequency options that could be used if one frequency was not working for whatever reason. There was no way to automate this function during WW2.
- Probably several hundred other technical issues prevented putting anything like the OP proposal into effect as well.