CL 92, CLG 4, CG 4
| Date |
Event |
Received from |
Subject |
Go to? |
| 07 Jun 1961 |
Commissioning
of U.S.S. Little Rock |
Sen. J.W.
Fulbright |
"Thank You" |
Yes |
| 27 Oct 1961 |
SecNav's
Visit to U.S.S. Little Rock |
Robert S.
McNamara (SecNav) |
"Thank You" |
Yes |
| 06 Jul 1975 |
U.S.S.
Little Rock's Anniversary |
James L.
Holloway III (CNO) |
Anniversary
Greetings |
Yes |
| 11 Jun 1975 |
Re-opening
of the Suez Canal |
American
Embassy Cairo |
USS Little
Rock Visit to Egypt |
Yes |
Hundreds of official communications were received (and sent) by the U.S.S. Little Rock every day.
These communications varied from mundane to critical, and from unclassified to "crypto".
Below are copies of some of the official "comms" to Little Rock that we have come across.
We are always on the lookout for additional input.
Feel free to contact the web master if you have something of interest.
(Wonder what all the numbers and letters in a Message mean? Click here.)
Click Here to check out the Radioman rate
| What do all those
numbers and letters mean? |
John Meyers asked on the Association
Message Board: "Maybe someone from the RM group can add a line
or two
of explanation and add to the story telling.... To which Tony La Tourette answered: 1. All naval communications is (sent) in "Zulu" which is Greenwich Mean Time ("GMT", or basically the time in London). It gives a common point of reference. 2. The jumble at the beginning of the message is its routing information. It is formatted for the autodin system which the navy used at the time. It basically tells where the message is going and the classification of the message. 3. Missing numbers refers to numbers missing on the fleet broadcast. All ships at sea copy the fleet broadcast and if you miss numbers due to any sort of reason, you do not have a complete broadcast, and thus you may have missed a message to your ship. 4. Mostly it was not the fault of an ET if a number was missed, but it was a good place to place blame. While the KWR-37 could be a temperamental machine the main cause of missed numbers was bad frequencies. 5. You need to have good frequencies to copy the fleet broad cast. The frequencies change with the time of the day. A good radioman would always be looking for a good frequency to change to when the frequency he was on started to go to hell. There are many ways to tell if the frequency is good. A good radioman could look at the URA-17 or URA-8 and tell if the freq was good. Also you had to keep your receiver at 0db. Another way was to have the frequency patched through a distortion analyzer. 6. This one I have no idea, but I figure it was better than finding a cigarette in a burn bag. Maybe if all contents were to be shredded, gum could be a problem. 7. A KWR-37 could be knocked out of sync for many reasons. the longer it was out of sync the more messages you would miss (see missing numbers) A common way to retrieve messages was to look at the broadcast recap that was sent every hour. The other way was to draft a service message which had to be released by the comm officer and by doing this you alerted him to about how long you were out of sync and he would start to ask all sorts of questions. On another note, a good aggressive operator would not miss too many numbers by utilizing several forms of diversity. Frequency diversity, space diversity, running two tty's on the broadcast, and always having a backup freq ready to go Hope that helped Yes I am a retired radioman, but never served on the Little Rock Ed. Notes: 1. A big "Thanks" to John Meyers for posing a question most of us would be afraid to ask! 2. And "Thanks" also to Tony La Tourette for a clear answer. |