FAAWTC
The USS Chicago on May 2nd 1964 at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. We changed ports to San Diego.
Two years later, on 12 May 1966, "Chicago" departed California for its first WesPac deployment. Since I was scheduled to leave the Navy in March 1966, I was given the choice of enlisting or leaving the "Chicago." Since I had a new wife at home, I opted for an Honorable Discharge.
I was transferred to the Fleet anti-aircraft training center in San Diego.
As a lead petty officer, I maintained a room full of AN/SPS-T2A radar training simulators. Sailors from the fleet would attend a two-week course on identifying and destroying incoming aircraft. The school would set up various scenarios with several dozen inbound aircraft. The students learned to distinguish which targets were enemy or friendly and their threat levels. They determined which targets would be handled by friendly aircraft and which would be managed by missiles aboard Navy cruisers, and what information (number, speed, course, and altitude) would be communicated to which defensive unit.
Ryan Aeronautical
This training helped me land a job at Ryan Aeronautical on Kearney Mesa when I left the Navy.
My intake interview centered on questions about electronic hardware and digital Doppler radar theory. I was told we would be designing and building a radar for a helicopter that will be flying at an altitude of 86,000 feet. For those of you interested in aeronautics, you know modern helicopters are unable to fly above 25,000 feet - the air is just too thin.
Lunar Excursion Module digital Doppler radar system
To land on the Moon, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) must know its exact altitude, attitude, and speed. We installed a radar system with four digital beams, one in each quadrant. The left and right radars were compared to determine the side-to-side position, and the front and rear radars were compared to determine the fore-and-aft position. We calculated the height and vertical speed by adding all the beams together and then dividing the result by four.
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