CaptSensible
26th Apr 2001, 02:06
A while back I worked for a SE Asian airline which had lots of Aussies. This company had adopted many of their Ozz style SOPs. Some of these made sense, others were downright weird.
I was recently chatting to an engineer friend about my experiences there, and mentioned the practice that they had convinced the locals to adopt as SOP regarding use of the VHF comms boxes.
For those of you not familiar with the 'Ozz style' it goes like this.
Most of the world (as far as I've seen) use the VHF 1 box as the main comms box. VHF 2 is used as a secondary one for getting weather, talking to company etc etc.
But not in Ozz apparently!
Down there the technique is to use VHF 1 to transmit, and VHF 2 to receive (I kid you not).
This means you have to tune the active frequency on box 1, and select the transmit switch only on that box. Box 2 is then selected to the same frequency, but the receive switch is selected on that box only.
The net result of all these shennanigans was that every time you got a frequency change you had to retune both boxes to the new frequency before transmitting on box 1 and receiving on box 2. Pain in the a**s!
When I deigned to ask why...I was told 'how else would you know if your transmitter was working/mike stuck open/transmission crossed'.
Fair enough...if that's how they wanted it then so be it. seemed like overkill to me though.
But my (electronics) engineer friend was totally incredulous. He claims that having both boxes tuned to the same frequency was likely to damage the RX box because of swamping by the too adjacent transmitting box, and that there was every likelihood the failure rates of the boxes (especially Box 2) would be higher than normal.
So, what do you think? Any Ozzies like to comment?
I was recently chatting to an engineer friend about my experiences there, and mentioned the practice that they had convinced the locals to adopt as SOP regarding use of the VHF comms boxes.
For those of you not familiar with the 'Ozz style' it goes like this.
Most of the world (as far as I've seen) use the VHF 1 box as the main comms box. VHF 2 is used as a secondary one for getting weather, talking to company etc etc.
But not in Ozz apparently!
Down there the technique is to use VHF 1 to transmit, and VHF 2 to receive (I kid you not).
This means you have to tune the active frequency on box 1, and select the transmit switch only on that box. Box 2 is then selected to the same frequency, but the receive switch is selected on that box only.
The net result of all these shennanigans was that every time you got a frequency change you had to retune both boxes to the new frequency before transmitting on box 1 and receiving on box 2. Pain in the a**s!
When I deigned to ask why...I was told 'how else would you know if your transmitter was working/mike stuck open/transmission crossed'.
Fair enough...if that's how they wanted it then so be it. seemed like overkill to me though.
But my (electronics) engineer friend was totally incredulous. He claims that having both boxes tuned to the same frequency was likely to damage the RX box because of swamping by the too adjacent transmitting box, and that there was every likelihood the failure rates of the boxes (especially Box 2) would be higher than normal.
So, what do you think? Any Ozzies like to comment?