Folks,
just replying to Ragnar on another thread, I was reminded of early papers written in the UK that evaluated German wartime equipment.
One is Walter Farrar's paper, available here, which summarised the work he did at SRDE during the war, when he was just a young graduate. I think, being young, he can be forgiven for his closing remarks in that paper...!
A much more detailed survey, published in 1950, is the one entitled "Telecommunications and Equipment in Germany during the period 1939 - 1945". This can be downloaded from here.
This document doesn't deal with radio comms directly (I don't know whether there is another one that does), although Section 7 gives some info in this area. Even so, some startling things are revealed - such as the early development of 1,029 lines TV (pg.34), quartz crystals up to 60Mc/s fundamental operation (pg. 36), and the use of high-speed morse (pg.8).
I find the last of these particularly interesting (the high speed morse), since it depended on the use of audio recording, which apparently the British didn't have. This agrees with what I know about the British high speed morse attempts - we could generate the high speed morse no trouble - we just couldn't decode it - which meant all British attempts at high speed morse were abandoned. This might have been very handy for those spies in occupied Europe, who were continually being rounded up when their transmissions were detected!
It makes me wonder whether the Germans had more spies in the UK than we know about. You can only know about the spies you actually detect, of course. If the Germans had high speed morse, then there is every chance the British couldn't detect or read it.
Richard
just replying to Ragnar on another thread, I was reminded of early papers written in the UK that evaluated German wartime equipment.
One is Walter Farrar's paper, available here, which summarised the work he did at SRDE during the war, when he was just a young graduate. I think, being young, he can be forgiven for his closing remarks in that paper...!
A much more detailed survey, published in 1950, is the one entitled "Telecommunications and Equipment in Germany during the period 1939 - 1945". This can be downloaded from here.
This document doesn't deal with radio comms directly (I don't know whether there is another one that does), although Section 7 gives some info in this area. Even so, some startling things are revealed - such as the early development of 1,029 lines TV (pg.34), quartz crystals up to 60Mc/s fundamental operation (pg. 36), and the use of high-speed morse (pg.8).
I find the last of these particularly interesting (the high speed morse), since it depended on the use of audio recording, which apparently the British didn't have. This agrees with what I know about the British high speed morse attempts - we could generate the high speed morse no trouble - we just couldn't decode it - which meant all British attempts at high speed morse were abandoned. This might have been very handy for those spies in occupied Europe, who were continually being rounded up when their transmissions were detected!
It makes me wonder whether the Germans had more spies in the UK than we know about. You can only know about the spies you actually detect, of course. If the Germans had high speed morse, then there is every chance the British couldn't detect or read it.
Richard
Comment