GB> Liberty ship radio room

[Chris Trask]

On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Bill Hawkins wrote:

> Toured the Liberty Ship JOHN W BROWN this afternoon, at Baltimore's
> Inner Harbor. This is the only such ship on the East coast. The radio
> room is fully restored. It has an ET 8023-D1 HF transmitter, 2-24 MC,
> and an ET 8024-A transmitter 300-500 KC, 200 watts. Matching receivers
> are AR 8506B and AR 8510. They run off ships power, 120 VDC, with the
> aid of MG sets. Only Morse is used, no speech transmission.  The panel
> has a clock with the auto alarm and silent periods marked in red, and
> there is an auto alarm decoder panel.  I took some pictures. We'll see
> what comes out.
>
> Our guide was a radio operator on a Liberty Ship, so he knew what he
> was talking about. I told him about BA and asked if I could use his
> name and call here.  He's Nelson Caley, W8EAR, of Canton, OH. He said
> not all ships had the HF radio. If you didn't, you were limited to
> about 200 miles, so you tried to find someone to relay your message.
>
> Then we went down to the engine room, where a single 3 stage piston
> steam engine turns the screw directly at 76 RPM, driving the 450 foot
> ship at 11 knots. But that's not the subject of this group, is it.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Hawkins
>

Bill,
        I recently toured the Jeremiah O'Brien, a fully restored and
seaworthy Liberty Ship in San Francisco.  It also has an original radio
room.  The FCC will not allow them to operate it as the harmonics from
the transmitter interfere with the FM broadcast band.

        The engine room in the O'Brien was used in the filming of
"Titanic" by replacing the ladders, light bulbs, etc. with smaller
ones, giving the illusion that the engine was larger.  They spent an
entire day going from forward to reverse for the film crew.

        The engine is a triple-expansion, which was long since obsolete
when the ships were made but could be made by any machine shop.  The
Navy had taken up all of the turbine manufacturing for warships.  There
are fewer than 10 operating triple-expansion engines left in the world,
and the 2,500 HP in the O'brien is the largest of these.  The Titanic
had three, but I don't know what their rating was.

        In the O'Brien you can walk down the shaft galley to the main
shaft bearing.  It's an interesting tour if you're not concerned with
being in small, dimly-lit places.


     ,----------------------.       Circuit Design for the
    /    What's all this     \            RF Impaired
   / extinct stuff, anyhow?  /
   \  _______,--------------'        Chris Trask / N7ZWY
  _ |/                               Principal Engineer
 oo\                                 ATG Design Services
(__)\       _                          P.O. Box 25240
  \  \    .'  `.                  Tempe, Arizona 85285-5240
   \  \  /      \
    \  '"        \                     Technical Editor,
     .       (  ) \                      QRP Quarterly
      '-| )__| :.  \                     QRP ARCI 9464
        | |  | | \  '.
       c__; c__;  '-..'>.__      Email:  ctrask at primenet.com
                               http://www.primenet.com/~ctrask

                    Graphics by Loek Frederiks

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