You might even organise a NAAFI wagon. (No Ambition And *******all Interest) at least it was in my day!;) Need really huge white china mugs though.

Another story of life at SM during the sixties!
During the mid/late sixties I was working in the Radar section, at that time I was on the Orange Harvest test bench. For those that may not know, Orange Harvest was a passive ESM carried by Shackletons, the most obvious sign of the equipment is the large “spark plug” on the roof of the aircraft halfway along the fuselage. This was used for picking up radar transmissions in a particular frequency band.

This was a day that brought the cold war home.

We had re-arranged some of the test equipment during the previous two days and switched on the OH to check that everything worked OK. After a few minutes we had a large line on the display and a fierce tone in the headset, it looked like we had introduced a problem! After about 20 minutes we still hadn’t discovered what the problem was. At this point Alex, the man I was working with selected to close the aerial shutters. The “spark plug” has four windows set at 90 degrees, the strength of the signal received by these windows gives a vector to the source of the radiation. This is displayed as a line on the small screen, the line is drawn from the centre to the outside and the position it hits on the edge is marked in degrees. The aerial has sensitive crystals just behind the windows and these can be damaged by close, strong signals. The shutters prevent the signal reaching the crystals by opening a co-axial relay, thus protecting the crystals. (Sorry about the explanation bit).
Closing the shutters stopped the noise and the signal disappeared. We concluded that the aerial must have developed a fault, there was a test oscillator in the top, it must have gone crazy. Just before we switched off and stripped the aerial Alex turned the whole assembly with the shutters open again, the signal position changed! Now we were not expecting that to happen.
We turned the aerial left and right and the signal moved with it. It was clearly from some external source. We then started to use further test equipment to analyse the signal. The radar bay chief had been watching us and realised that something unusual was happening. We showed him what we were seeing and he suddenly rushed off without saying a word. Five minutes later he retuned accompanied by a bespectacled, slightly ruffled looking Flt Lt. His only words were “showing him what you’ve got”. So we went through what had happened and the results of our analysis.
Again without a word being said he disappeared in great haste as soon as we had finished. About 35 minutes later the signal disappeared, never to return.

A couple of hours later we were ushered into the flight commanders office, in the room was the Flt Lt who we had seen earlier, he now introduced himself as the Station Intelligence Officer. One of the pieces of info we had given him was that the signal came from about 309-312 degrees. He told us that he had managed to get a Shackleton T4 on local flying to carry out a search on that bearing and lo and behold he had found a Russian “Trawler” sitting 12 miles out in direct line of the main runway. They could even see the height finding radar being used to by the trawler; this was the source of our signal. Once he’d been discovered and been buzzed by aircraft on local flying he upped anchor and sailed away.

Yeah, sorry meant 404. 405 was used by 22 sqdn and the forty second foot and mouth sqdn, as they were known! One half had the rails in for moving Shacks in sideways and a “scanner pit”. T’other half was 22’s bit.

Radar/Comms section was just down the hill from the rear of 404, I believe it was used by the safety bods once the new electronics centre had been built. Had to turn the windows that the radar fired out of the new building by 90 degrees. In the original radar section we used to look virtually due south, unfortunately it caused lots of interference on the televisions of the in line senior officers quarters! Hence the change to pointing east over the fields in the new centre.

During winter excercises the floor of 404 was covered in sleeping airmen, that heated floor was just so comfortable!

I think we were called rectification flight at one time, the management was appalling. After a period of particulary bad decisions moral was below rock bottom, it was agreed that both shifts would secretly “work to rule”. Of course the senior nco’s were aware but were unable to get anything changed so simply played along. After four days we had no serviceable aircraft, the managements response was to change the shift system to 12 on 12 off. Three days later and still no servicable aircraft, finally someone at command HQ realised that there was a problem and a junior officer was dispatched from Northwood to investigate. So who did he talk to? Yeah, you know the engineering officers. He returned to Northwood none the wiser. Two days later a middle aged Flt Lt appeared in the crew room. To some us he was well known, an ex Chief Tech who had been commissioned a couple of years ealier; within a week we had a new engineering officer and a couple of the juniors were “re-assigned”. Within 24 hours we had generated 10 serviceable aircraft.

Mind you we all had some serious “interviews” afterwards.

I was a radar tech on NLF in 1975-77 we used to “look” after the 7 sqdn aircraft out of hours, NLF covered 24hrs a day 7 days a week, so we were available for handling visiting aircraft and other strays. We always saw 7 sqdn in onto the south dispersal, at that time this was their main operating dispersal.
A lot of the airworks were ex RAF and mosly ex Shack, so we knew most of them very well.
That was my second posting to St.M the first was Dec 1963 and I was initially working in 402 hanger. This was ASF and we did minors/majors on all squadron aircraft on the station, i.e. 42, 201 and 206 sqds. At that time out of hours was covered by a roster of 10 (duty crew) who spent a week “over the other side” covering outside normal hours. This could get quite busy as SM was a master diversion airfield. We also were expected to do our normal job at the same time.

When our man returns from the US I’ll get the manuals/diags copied for you. Not sure when he’s back and when I’ll get the manuals; so it might be weeks rather than days unfortunately.

Shack diagrams

If you still need this info I can give you the diagrams from a MKIII. They are much the same for a MKII apart from the outer wing section. The MKIII has the tip tank, otherwise the break points are the same.

The tail/fin/rudder is fairly clear.

I’ll just show you some of the diagrams in the manual. If you need it I can send you via email etc pdf files with relevant info.