Metox

[Oleif]

ummm, what he said

[xrvjorn]

Originally Posted by jasondef

So what you're saying is that there's no chance of getting a hold of a radar detector-detector-detector for your car in addition to a radar detector to thwart those pesky police speed traps with radar guns and radar detector detectors! :P

If radar detectors are illegal, maybe radar detector-detector-detector aren't? In order to detect them, the police would need to get radar detector-detector-detector-detectors, and the counter measure for that would be ...

[Oleif]

hey xrvjorn, could you post a pic of your rig? that sounds like a supercomputer...

[HEMISENT]

Don't know about radar detector-detector-detectors to combat speed radars but I do know that radar jammers are now coming down in price- should be ordering one this spring. Supposedly the good ones work pretty well against everything except lasar speed detection.

[xrvjorn]

Originally Posted by Oleif

hey xrvjorn, could you post a pic of your rig? that sounds like a supercomputer...

It uses quite a bit of electicity, so I have a small nuclear reactor to keep it running. It makes me lose all my hair, but I glow nicely in the dark and have a handsome green tan.

[Kaptan Tommy]

Originally Posted by xrvjorn

If radar detectors are illegal, maybe radar detector-detector-detector aren't? In order to detect them, the police would need to get radar detector-detector-detector-detectors, and the counter measure for that would be ...

:rotfl:

[Big Vern]

Metox did leek the signal from its Local Oscillator out of the Biscay Cross aerial and it was detectable from a homing receiver on an aircraft at ranges up to 50Km. The Germans knew the Local Oscillator frequency of the equipment, built a homing Receiver and trialled it in July 1943. The Story about the RAF pilot saying the British were homing on Metox is also true, he was interrogated in Early August 1943 and the U-Boat command were informed on the same day.

[Hooston]

i used to work as an aircraft electromagnetic compatibility engineer about 15 years ago. Post war military comms gear has some antenna terminal tests to pass to make sure they do not leak any compromising (or more usually irritating) signals. TV sets in the UK used to deliberately leak the local oscillator so that "detector vans" could find people watching TV without a licence, although I believe more usually it was done by peeking through the curtains!

As you might expect from a quick lash up, Metox leaked its local oscillator signal. As some posters have said the Germans got in a panic about it thanks to some genius PoW shooting a line, but the Allies never made use of the signals. Thanks to wolfpack tactics and Doenitz's control freak command style Uboats made regular reports over HF which gave away their position even when the signal could not be decripted.
According to Prof R V Jones' book the Germans also fell for the "Crosse and Blackwell" super bomber thanks to another PoW.

[Aktungbby]

Big Vern! Great Necro!< at least providing a ready-made cross you could pray to when being depth charged!??

The Metox was manufactured by a small French company in occupied Paris. It was tuned to receive the 1.5-metre (200 MHz) signals used by many British radars of the early and mid-World War II era, notably the ASV Mk. II radar used by RAF Coastal Command to attack U-boats. It is not clear whether the design was German or French or both. It was installed on German U-boats starting in 1942 and used until the end of the war.[1] The system given the official title of FuMB 1 (for Funkmessbeobachtungsgerät, Radio measuring device).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASV_Mark_II_radar They didn't call it the Wizard War for nothing! Required reading for true ers>

[Kal_Maximus_U669]

Big Vern! Great Necro!< at least providing a ready-made cross you could pray to when being depth charged!

Here is the manual that goes with it.... to save your skin.......

[Hooston]

I've been thinking again about an allied PoW spreading the story that the allies were homing on spurious Metox emissions. Doesn't it come from RV Jones' book? I can't remember. I always got the impression that the Prof liked his stories.
It doesn't seem a very likely tale for a serviceman to come up with. Is it not possible that this particular crewman was indeed using his ASV mk II radar to detect Metox emissions? Metox might show up as a uniform shifting of the line on his "A scope" display, depending on the exact setup of the ASV receiver and display circuitry. If he was doing so it would make him more likely to find a uboat and thus also more likely to get shot down and captured!

I don't suppose we will ever know as everyone involved is pushing up the daisies. I suppose it makes no difference to the outcome - a lot of spurious activity from the Germans and even deactivation of the receiver at one point.

[Shadowblade]

Originally Posted by Hooston

I've been thinking again about an allied PoW spreading the story that the allies were homing on spurious Metox emissions. Doesn't it come from RV Jones' book? I can't remember. I always got the impression that the Prof liked his stories.

source should be:
Ratcliff, R. A. (14 August 2006). Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers. Cambridge University Press. p. 146. ISBN 0521855225