Thank Christ the solution for this is obvious - let's have another OEM provided stove pipe comms solution, that'll fix it.

P6 has the right of it.

But HQII can be run through a cypher...to produce 'the purest green'.

BEagle old chap,

I also never understood how HQ got its own world of mythology...even in the old days checking MWODs, Op Days etc only took 5 minutes...for some reason the boat used to find it impossible to work on even days...somewhat frustrating when we kept explaining the bleeding obvious!

HQ (hopping) is termed Transmission Security, Encryption Communications Security. Both are "secure" but in different ways. In the early - mid 90s one could buy a simple off the shelf receiver that could track HQII, so the degree of TRANSEC became debatable, as you say.


Beagle

Agree, although of course I look at the issue as someone who wrote the specs and managed programmes to deliver the specs. The advent of GPS further complicated updating, partly because GPS was seen to be the great solution, but was actually in service for many years while still immature and little understood.

Someone mentioned the March 2003 Tornado/Patriot shootdown. (Root cause, refusal to integrate failure warnings). The same day two Sea King ASaCs were lost. The BoI report says Time of Day was not available to their HQII radios. (The same fault was in Chinook ZD576). What the BoI didn't mention was that at the same time the above secure mode "modification" problem was discovered (also affecting ASaC), so too was a feature of the GPS spec which meant most Mil Std GPS units could only support two ToD loads. A Buffer Unit was needed if you required more than two. e.g. JTIDS, 2 x HQII, Crypto etc. The BoI doesn't say why the HQII radios didn't have ToD, forcing "mickey". Or, of course, when this anomaly (because it apparently wasn't deemed a fault) occurred or if the crews knew of it. By not mentioning this (or, more likely, not being told in the first place) the BoI missed a very important factor. In other words, it is entirely possible a whole LRU was missing that was necessary to make the above systems function reliably; with no immediate indication to crew if they were not functioning (or even connected together properly). One thing is absolutely certain - neither aircraft was compliant with the specified build standard, and hence Safety Case. It is an interesting example of how a minor problem can mushroom if not controlled. In this case, the "control" was lost through loss of corporate knowledge. Detailed corporate knowledge was required at an individual level because of the aforementioned organisational fault. It is a vicious circle and almost impossible to counter once implemented.

All these events are closely linked. The problem, from my perspective, was due to stove-piping; the project that discovered the failures or problems was expected to solve the entire problem for MoD. The project that discovered the HQII spec downgrade and ToD Buffering was a Minor Equipment Requirement (MER) and could barely afford to solve them for it's aircraft (2 fleets), never mind the rest. This situation was brought about by de-centralisation of the process whereby build standards were maintained under a single funding line.

Tuc,
The TRANSEC element of HQII was the ability to hop around the UHF band to prevent spot jamming of frequency - thereby 'ensuring' the tx got through. The HQ project was initiated after sucessful Arab jamming of the IAF in the Yom Kippur war. When it entered service, the 'hop rate' conferred a degree of ComSec but, as you rightly identify, 'off the shelf' hopping units were soon available to negate this. Therefore, to ensure ComSec, a HQII radio must use a separate (KY series normally) encryption device. The HMI on our old HQ radios was pretty appalling; unfortunately I always seemed to be the only pilot on the Sqn that understood them so guess who got the job of loading and testing them prior to every exercise or Op mission......

SATURN hop rates are far higher than HQII to ensure TRANSEC but are still designed to operate in conjunction with Crypto to assure ComSec. Of course, SATURN should be the NATO-standard now (the clue is in the acronym)....yet another commonality allowed to drift.

Evalua8tor

Agreed. The programme I referred to above was the first to encrypt a HQII radio. And use it for UHF Homing. But switchable so you could use them in HQII mode only. The spec caused a stir at the time. I included the upgrade path to SATURN (I wrote it in Dec 94) but OR gave me an earful, stating the aircraft would "never" need or receive SATURN. Nevertheless, I contracted the system design without telling anyone and SATURN is, I believe, now fitted. I also had a 3rd design drawn up, to include BOWMAN. Another story......

The loss of a secure mode I referred to was either Di-Phase or Full Baud Binary - for the life of me I can't recall which one the US ditched. FBB I think. We simply couldn't understand why they'd de-mod the radios. If they didn't want to use one mode, then don't provide a switch on the controller. But don't deny other customers the option without telling them; it was one of the reasons why we'd bought the things int he first place. I remember sitting at a bench with the UK Design Custodian for a day physically comparing the new US printed circuit boards with our old circuit diagrams, until we eventually spotted which component was missing. It was a single diode. Their attitude toward configuration control was worse than the French, which is saying something. (But better than ours, because it was our policy NOT to maintain CC at all!)

When I first saw a HaveQucik radio back in the late 1980s, my immediate concern was that loading the MWODs was too error-prone and that there was nothing similar to a 'checksum' to confirm that the correct MWOD had been loaded. My recommendation was for fill-gun MWOD loading. Another concern was that obtaining a TOD if OOA could be difficult, so a back up stable time reference was needed. GPS was immature then, so another option was a high stability 'rubidium oscillator' - mention of which at the subsequent squadron brief caused much mirth....

Roll on to GW1 and I was sprung from doing Jimmy Savile time at a UAS back to the VC10K. We used HQII, but loading MWODs was indeed time consuming and when the comms geeks found that we'd been photocopying the data and handing it to the crews, they went nuts. "How else do you expect us to load the damn things?" fell on deaf ears. Talking about deafness, we found that HQII radios, even in non-AJ mode, weren't as sensitive as non-HQII radios. It seem that to reduce the popping sound from squelch tails, 'someone' had raised the squelch threshold, so that weak AM signals didn't get through.

Some years later and another war. We now had new HQII radios with fill-gun MWOD loading, plus another LRU in the radio bay which contained the infamous rubidium oscillator! Just as I'd recommended about 12 years earlier....:rolleyes: But at least the aeroplane FRCs had been amended to include the same HQII idiots' guide which I'd written in 1991!

A customer's aeroplane, which has a secure voice system, is fitted with 'IF BW BB/DP' pushbuttons, the purpose of which, apparently, is to enable 'either Base Band (BB) or DiPhase (DP) to be selected as the bandwidth (BW) of the intermediate frequency (IF)'.

Well fine. That's rather less useful than the note in a car radio manual I once had 'If EOS is pressed in PTY mode, the display is switched to Swedish'. I tried it - it did. Fortunately un-Swedish-ing it was quite simple.

The crews had no idea whether they were supposed to use BB or DP and no-one knew anyone on the squadron who could explain the function :rolleyes: Another stellar piece of wacky-wireless procurement, it would seem!

Thank Christ the solution for this is obvious - let's have another OEM provided stove pipe comms solution, that'll fix it.

and presumably the Prophet, the Gurus, Ganesh, Moses et al.

to be ecumenical.