Quote:
Originally Posted by M0AFJ, Tim
The other thing to remember was the expected life of the aircraft crews, why spend a fortune on a Rolls Royce when a mini would survive the few expected trips.
Poignant today of course.
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Tim,
I agree with your point - however that relates specifically to the quality of construction I think, and rather less to the performance.
The original performance had to be "adequate", to paraphrase those famous R-R people. Clearly "adequate" in this case didn't run to stabilised power supplies - and that was probably because the expected radio links, ground in the UK, to planes over Germany, or plane to plane, was extremely non-demanding. Simple line of sight in fact. No need for bouncing anything off the ionosphere.
So the performance could be no better than "so-so", with just ordinary AM bandwidth being OK, even when CW was in use. In the plane, the voltage rails may well have been quite stable once the plane was in the air, obviously with the engines running. As far as I recall the power system had generators charging 24V batteries - producing a roughly 28V rail, which would then power some hefty dynamotors. Those things have quite a lot of inertia and thus their output voltage is pretty stable over a period of seconds, and possibly minutes. So no need to be chasing signals up the band.
And as far as temperature goes.....it was generally agreed that it was blooming freezing in those Lancasters, as someone has already pointed out about the use of gloves......no doubt not just cold, but also cold and stable.
Richard