[Wismajorvik]

Originally Posted by ChasD

Hi Lucy, Think it was about early ’64, probably Teesport, when a bunch of guys from Chelmsford turned up with ‘ A pressie for you !’ which turned out to be a pre-production Crusader, bit strange as I was Seimens/AEI in those days, but it went in and it worked ! Great for when we went from there out east. Plenty of shout, but lots of trouble especially with the ledexes!
Think Mangelia had a Crusader/ Pennant rig, that would be 1970, again a surprise visit by a bunch of guys with boxes. The Lincompex, rather a strange beast which took the usual audio signal and pushed every half cycle to max level so that the transmitter was driven flat out continuously, the idea being that it would punch through anything. A sidetone told the receiving end how much the signal had been ‘modified’ so it could ‘un-modify’ back to original. Fine idea but I don’t think it came to much. Landsend/ GLD had one, as did GKA but as few, if any at all, ships had one it didn’t come to much.
The ‘Selcall’ was literally a ‘Breadboard’ mock up, on a piece of plywood. At random points in the day, GKA would bash their test button, make a test call, chunter some nonsense via Lincompex, which was recorded on a Philips cassette and I had to try to analyse why it didn’t function properly!
Fine while we were on the same time scale, pain in the butt when we weren’t!
The whips were forever loosing bits, cracking insulators, fortunately no injuries, but more than a pain.


Regards ... Chas

Lincompex was used primarily on point to point HF circuits. At the TX end audio was split in two paths, one path was amplified to nearly a constant level, the sybillic rate used to frequency modulate a pilot signal at 2960hz. At the RX end the demodulated pilot was used to vary the level of the received audio re-creating the original. Or something like that...did a course in '68 and worked live on the kit in '76.