bushmills

[sir_jim_wallaby]

What was the name of the navigation aid used from the 50s up to the late 70s the last example of which i believe was sited at bushmills ireland?
mostly for the atlantic crossing i think
cheers

[Hew Jampton]

Consol? Might have been Loran A.

[Soddit]

Indeed it was Consol. Bushmills ( 266kHz) was one of five such stations in Western Europe. The others were:
Stavanger ( Norway) 319kHz
Quimper ( France) 257 kHz ( c/s FRQ)
Lugo ( Spain) 285kHz ( c/s LG)
Seville ( Spain)315kHz (c/s SL)

Each ground station consisted of a transmitter and three aerials in a straight line. Using this aid to navigation required nothing more than a suitable receiver and a set either of special charts or tables. CAP 59 was the UK handbook which included the tables and it stated that ( with various caveats) ranges by day over the sea were around 1000 nm and by night 1200 nm.However using it was a slow process - you could not take simultaneous fixes and each plot required about two minutes of concentrated effort. It couldn't be used as a homing aid: what it did give was a position line.It was much beloved of the Nav General Examiners in the early 70's!

[gordonzola]

Black Label

[411A]

Loran A worked MUCH better...even a pilot could understand same....well......just. Navigators, bless 'em' were much better at it.:D :D

[Simtech]

The Consol system was developed in Germany during WW2 and was known by them as Sonne, and had the distinction of being used by both sides at the same time. There is a story that the Germans were having trouble with their Spanish Sonne transmitter but were unable to get spare parts to it, so the British supplied the Spanish with the items required to get the transmitter operational again, largely for the benefit of Coastal Command.

The Stavanger station, callsign LEC, was the last operational Consol station and went off the air sometime after 1991. The callsign of the Bushmills station was, if my memory is correct, MWN.

[Soddit]

Simtech, thank you for that : your recollections of Stavanger and Bushmills callsigns are correct..for completeness I have edited my post to include the others. I had not related Sonne to Consol before your post ( early senility !).Will research it.

[Bigears]

Simtech, If you're going to cut & paste from someones website, then you really should provide a link! :D Sonne/Consol (http://webhome.idirect.com/~jproc/hyperbolic/consol.html)
"A few years ago the longwave bands were full of those CONSOLS. A very interesting chain was on 332.5 with LEX Andoya (northern Norway), LJS Bear Island and LMC Jan Mayen, which could be heard often even during the day in wintertime. These were all decommissioned in February 1985.
Other stations like Rybackij in Russia were closed at the beginning of the Nineties." from here.. (http://frodo.bruderhof.com/longwave/notebook/n52.txt)

[Soddit]

Bigears- grateful thanks for the links especially the one to the VE3FAB site. Finding some of the references is going to need a bit of ingenuity.:D Good thing its a wet Sunday..

[reynoldsno1]

Aaaaaah, Consol - originally designed for use by U-Boats as I recall. It was actually quite easy to use, just took a long time counting all those dashes and dots and timing the null signal between them. You could also DF it - a lot easier in the end!