Originally Posted by
Tankertrashnav
Electronics? I was a Victor nav radar and was under the impression that those cans (Calc 2 and 3, etc) mainly contained springs and elastic bands.
Ref Green Satin, the OCU ground school at Marham had a Green Satin Janus array aerial set up to demonstrate how it worked. The aerial clanking to and fro once a second was wondrous to behold. Eventually it was replaced by something more up to date (I forget what it was called) which was about the size of a brief case. In my years on the Victor K1 we lost several bits of heavy kit, including the Calc 3, the R88 camera, the multi seat liferaft as well as the afore-mentioned Green Satin, but none of this seemed to make the aircraft any more anxious to get into the air on takeoff!
Not quite TTN, Calc3 was the ballistics computer, never worked on K1s but all the ballistics kit was removed on the K2.
Calc1 and 2 formed the Nav. Chain. There was a requirement to amplify D.C. voltages, not easy in those days, so what they did was to feed the input D.C. to the contacts of a relay being driven at 400 Hz. This gave a square wave switching between ref earth and the input DC. This was amplified and then passed to another identical relay which was exactly in synch with the input one. This gave the amplified D.C. as required. Calc1 had the relays and drives, Calc 2 had the amps. It was all clever stuff in those days, there was a Calc5 which consisted of mainly motors, potentiometers and a spring steel tape, this was the really clever one as it performed a Pythagorus calculation mechanically.
Decca 72 replaced Green Grot.