DennisK -
Blue Silk OR Green Satin.
Blue Silk was an early attempt at sideways looking radar that produced a sort of roller map etched onto heat sensitive paper - same sort of stuff used in early fax machines. i.e. it was used as a recce device. It was very rare it worked and it quietly went away. I never saw it myself, but when I was first posted to 12 we still had 2 old B2s that had the equipment racks for it in the back hatch.
Green Satin - Doppler navigation equip. In the Canberra the antenna system was in a bay twixt No 1 Engine and the wingroot with a dielectric panel cover. The Tx/Rx and Tracker (computer) cans were in the back hatch. It worked much better in Canberras than it ever did in Vulcans (even when the Vs were upgraded to Mk2) Possibly due to the fact that Vulcans had a similar layout in the form of an offset aerial system and a very, very long cable that carried analog computational signals to the Nav's display in the cabin. This cable (although) shielded, took a tortuos route over the engines, through the bomb and nosewheel bays to get there - picking up extraeneous "noise" on the way.
Orange Putter. Tail Warning x-band radar. The radar head formed the tailcone of the aircraft - (also fitted to Valiants and early Mk1 Vulcans and Victors). In the Canberra, the pilot had a tiny 'scope just under the coaming at about 11 o'clock. It represented a sort of rear view mirror with any returns appearing as a blip in the relevant quarter. At 1000 yds the blip grew wings - unsurprisingly known as "wings range". It was sarcastically suggested that it was so useless that it might as well have been wired up to the ejector seats as by the time it gave any warning you were done for anyway. There was also audio alerts fed into the headset - these were invariably turned off because of spurious fales warnings. Our aircraft were using LABS attacks and through the fullness of time almost all the aeroplanes managed to throw the Orange Putter radar heads down the range when the high g pull-ups became too much for the 4 bolts holding the thing on. They were replaced at first, but this became considered a fruitless excercise and eventually all our squadron aircraft but 2 had aluminium tali cones. The space left by the missing electronics was usefully employed as a stash for duty free fags and cigars on return from sunspots in Luqa and Idris.
In short - Orange Putter was junk.
Edit: Thinking back, the Green Satin Panel was outboard of No 1. - couldn't have been inboard as the wheel was there.
2nd Edit: I was right first time - Green Satin panel was aft of the wheel well. (just googled up an old drawing)
Last edited by Once_an_Erk; 31st Mar 2009 at 12:54.