30450 Radio Relay Equipment Repair / Wideband Maintenance. TRC_24 / TRC 97 and MRT 2 Testing.  What I did in Radio Relay, basically I worked on a very special type a radios which could handle up to 24 voice channels at a time. Think of 24 phone calls mixed together into one and then transmitted  over the air 17 to 90 miles per link. The next radio relay site could break down the signal and route them to phones, radios, or teletype machines or crosspatch the incoming  signal to another radio and retransmit it to a distant location for  increase range. During times of national emergence, training, or war games, groups of special trained people would drive in or fly in to unimproved location built a tactical air base, communication relay site, or a distant communication site (forward operating location) The time frame for this varies from 7 days to 3 and half hours. Be there, done that, got the blister and splinters, tore it down, pack it up, cleaned it up, realignment it, and did the whole job over and over, again and again, couldn't afford the Tee shirt, so I keep ball cap and left! The Trc-97 was billed as the world's most expensive transistor radio which is not technically correct because it did have a TWT (traveling wave tube) and Klystron tube both of these tubes did not look like anything that even fit inside of an old T.V.  The TWT as full encased in sheet metal and the other weighted about 35 pounds and is made mostly for cast iron with some porcelain and two very large magnets bolted to it for beam stabilizing. 

 

 

30671, Electronic-Mechanical Communications and Cryptographic Equipment Systems Specialist FYA71,  DSTE, Digital Subscriber Terminal Equipment. System nick name THE BLUE WHALE. The DSTE system was installed in most military communication center. The system consisted of CCU or  Central Control Unit, Page printer, Low speed card punch, High speed card punch, Punch card reader, Paper tape readers, Low speed tape punch, High speed paper tape punch, Modem, Box, and Cryptographic equipment, Crypto Control Unit, and a Cook patch panel. The Base Communications Center receives 98 percent of all messages for a given location. All payroll, finance, personnel maters, assignments, promotions, logistic, press releases, classified and unclassified flow thou the base comm center. I think being a DSTE  technician was very interesting because you needed a very good understanding of digital electronics plus a very solid command of mechanical principle. ( REWORK I think, anyway something could be done or might be do was the philosophy used in the engineering of this beast. Sometimes I wonder if  Rube Goldberg wasn’t a consulting engineer,  The Low speed card punch had six fan belt, eight or nine tooth driven belts, three lobed cams, knifes, interposers, solenoids, pushrods, pinch rollers, actuators, gates, a chad bucket, and a  ferrite-core memory. Real old school technology. A core memory uses a matrix of small metal rings sometimes called donuts, with numerous wires  interlace  through these rings on the  x and y plane plus diagonally. How the hell can I remember this shit from basic electronics at Kessler airplane patch in beautiful downtown Biotoxic (Biloxi) Ms., but forget were my car keys are at. is beyond me! Should I say something about the all power supplies with crowbar protected circuits and the with weak under rated SCR, probably none.