Oral History Gallery

Extract Text (Duration02.19)

At the time, the late 1960s, semi-conductors were coming in, transistors, the early types of transistor were coming in and we're starting to replace the valve in a lot of low power and medium power applications, which make for much more reliable and much more smaller equipment for fitting in things like aircraft and helicopters. Much more reliable and therefore the need for constant maintenance decreased. It would ease the pressure on men and maintenance quite a lot and add to the overall efficiency. You could have more frequencies, the oscillators which maintained the frequency would be much more stable, they wouldn't drift so much, you wouldn't lose communication or have what you call 'down time' which is one thing that was a bad word is down time. I mean you know now if your own telephone is not working or your TV doesn't work it's really aggravating, so you can imagine what that was like in the forces, especially in a tactical situation, in a war situation if something isn't working correctly. So yes, it improved that. I think the Leander Class had the early version of ICS, which is Integrated Communication System. Ours was like a hotchpotch of some radio transmitter stuffed in a compartment. Nothing was really integrated, they all operated independently, whereas ICS was introducing more integrated systems, switching from one thing to another, very much quicker. It could be operated from the Ops Room or from the Bridge, changing frequencies, transmitters from a more remote position instead of running down to the compartment and doing it. Automatic tuning started to come on board. So we did have an early transmitter, a Marconi, it's called the 640 self-tuning transmitter, that was one of the first types. So we had a lot of self-tuning and miniaturisation which increased reliability and miniaturisation.

Q: So the [HMS] Brighton was beginning to...?

A: Was just beginning to, yes, it was, but very early days though.