Lesson 1: Why the M-16 is so bad
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=706392Okay folks, you asked for it.
We used to use smoke signals to communicate. Still do, in fact--soldiers can draw grenades that produce one of four different colors of smoke. The daily signals operating instructions tells the troop what color to use in what circumstance. And, assuming someone from the MI battalion hasn't breached your perimeter, pried the lid off the bottom of your smoke grenades, dumped out half of the smoke powder and refilled them with tear gas powder (like I used to do to units with bad security), you can pop a red grenade to show a helicopter pilot it's safe to land, or a green one to mark the edge of your battalion's sector. IIRC you can get red, green, yellow and purple.
(It is no fun to draw a fifty-gallon drum of tear gas powder when you're a specialist fourth class who's not in the chemical company but who is standing there chuckling and rubbing your hands together in anticipation of going to the woods for a month...)
This isn't about smoke. It's about radio.
Nowadays they have all sorts of neat stuff--fax machines, datacom, you name it and it's there. But a mile down the road from your state-of-the-art Pentium-powered setup is another unit whose radio gear was captured from the Viet Cong.
The radios I grew up with were from the VRC-12 series. No one has ever seen a VRC-12. An official VRC-12 has twelve buttons on the front. Each is set to a different frequency. Push one and it tunes the radio to a particular net. They tell me you have to use a hammer to get the buttons to go in. No one wants this radio because if you need to be on twelve pushes (radio nets) at once, you need to be able to hear twelve pushes at once, which means you need twelve radios.
The two radios you're more likely to see are the VRC-46 and the PRC-77. Both can have voice scramblers hooked to them. The -46 is for vehicles, although you can get a power supply and plug it into the wall. It has two output power settings, low (five watts) and high (seventy). It has two squelches to stop the evil hiss from coming through. Old squelch is signal-level-activated; new squelch is tone-activated. (This was the high tech of its day. Your radio transmitted a low-pitched tone along with your voice. The squelch would only open if it heard that tone.) No one uses the old squelch. This radio weighs 70 pounds and has three tubes in it.
The next two radios in this series are the VRC-47 and VRC-48. You get one VRC-46 transmitter plus either one (-47) or two (-48) receivers. If you need to be on three pushes at once a -48 might work, but when you tune your transceiver to the frequency on one of the receivers, you have to diligently set the receiver to the frequency that was on the transmitter...any wonder why someone who might think about using a -47 would rather have two -46s instead?
(Note: There is a big problem with putting two -46s in a HMMWV. The radio sits between the front seats in a Hummer. Put two -46s in and the driver can't see around the radios.)
The reason no one uses old squelch is the PRC-77, which only has new squelch. This is manpackable, but there is a tray to let you use it in a vehicle. It has one power setting, five watts. It runs off a battery that's about the size of a long brick and lasts as long as it feels like. I could put a battery in and get two days out of it, then put another battery from the same batch in and get six hours. Then change batteries and get an hour, followed by getting three days out of the fourth.
These radios are old and slightly unreliable, but the real reason we need to get rid of them is because we can't talk to the British and Germans unless we send them one of our radios. They use frequency-hopping radios that change channels fifty times a second. To talk to the allies, we introduce SINCGARS--the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. One radio for both trucks and helicopters--and small enough to carry in a rucksack! This is a good system that's in short supply.
Now for fun: We also have a system called MSE--Mobile Subscriber Equipment. Remember the cell phones you had to have mounted in your car? MSE is like that--a telephone instrument on the dash, a very large transceiver box in the back seat. It also jams your SINCGARS radio last I checked. Hopefully that's been fixed. MSE gives the user a lot of capability: you can hook your computer to it, call your office phone, even order a tank of acetylene from the local welding shop if you run out. The weak point in MSE is that the division signal battalion owns the cell towers, and they don't always come to the field with you. (However, you always take the MSE gear when you go out; it is too hard to get it out of your truck.)
We have some satellite stuff, but it came out after I got out, so no information there, sorry.
We've always had radio teleprinter capability--we call it RATT, for Radio Teletype. The RATT Rig is a box that looks like a pickup camper. It is staffed by a trained soldier, and it's at a fairly high echelon--the division signal battalion owns all the RATT in division and sends it to brigade when it's needed. Sometimes battalion. No lower. We were playing around with using PCs as terminals with a specially-modified ham radio RTTY modem back in the early 1990s. Maybe that works now. Who knows?
We also have wireline. There are two kinds: the old crank-type TA-312 field phone that made you feel like you should be asking about how the corn was growing when you used it, and the new touchtone one that requires bringing the signal battalion out with you. Most guys with the touchtone one also bring out a TA-312 and an SB-22 switchboard even though that's Korean War technology; you can run over a TA-312 with a Jeep and it will still work. (Don't ask me how I know this.)
That's basic stuff.
Who gets what? Depends on the unit. I always had any gear I wanted. An infantry platoon will have a PRC-77, maybe some little squad radios (they're buying police-model handhelds now) and perhaps a field phone. The division commander will have a truck with enough radios to talk to everyone directly subordinate to him at one time. He'll also have Iridium and MILSAT.
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