"Dave in San diego" wrote in message
. ..
Greasy Rider wrote in
:

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 12:44:36 -0800, "W. D. Allen Sr."
postulated :
For what it's worth...

(snipped)

It was a dark and stormy night aboard the Intrepid in the fall of
1957. A twenty year old Aviation Electronics Tech (AT3) was tasked
with replacing the UHF radio (ARC-27) in FJ-3M number 204 tied down on
the flight deck.

[remainder redacted]

You had to go and do it - bring up old painful memories. The ARC-27 was
my second least favorite piece of tron gear to replace. The ARN-21 TACAN
ranked first, primarily because of its generally more difficult location
in the a/c. Can you believe they still had those boat anchors around into
the 80s?

We had the landbased companion the GRC-27 which was the size of a
refrigerator in 1979. Lots of tiny gears to get in sync and loads of fun
bending silver tabs (which acted as capacitors) to tune it. You'd get every
thing right at 375MHZ and then find everything off at 250MHZ. Since it was
being junked they finally decided to let the E-4s and above work on it and
only if it was actually broke.

It did provide one of my more funnier movements in the Air Force. Our NCOIC
who was as well the custodian of all the squadrons radio equipment was a
stickler for every tiny screw being with his equipment and 8 of the cover
screws were missing from a GRC-27. For some reason supply couldn't find a
good part number and eventually our chief of maintenance , a very foxy
female 1st LT, called and I was the lucky guy who answered the phones when
she asked me about the the screws. The team leader for that equipment was
in the office and I put my hand on the mouthpiece aid "Hey Lt Blank is on
the phone and wants to know about 8 screws for a GRC-27? His reply? "hell I
don't need 8 screws from a GRC-27, I'll screw her for free." Which promptly
put the whole shop into uncontrollable laughter including (although not
known at the time) her future E-4 husband. Got to give her credit, she was
a pretty good sport about it when she finally found out what had happenned.


Dave in San Diego
O-level Tweet ('70 - '75)