An excellent summation of CONELRAD. The only correction is
the lower frequency. It was 620 Kcs which is half the
upper frequency of 1240. This was for reception at the
higher freq by use of the harmonic effect.
When I was in high school in the late 50's we had a school
fm broadcast station. Our CONELRAD detector was a standard
receiver with an addon device that squawked when the
carrier was lost. Our control station was Radio station
WOWO in Fort Wayne IN. We tested the receiver every hour
by pressing a phone jack in. This acted like the loss of
carrier from WOWO and sounded a LOUD horn. When WOWO would
loose it's carrier due to what ever it really got your
heart going. We were in the middle of the great nuk war
threat and never knew if or when the balloon would go up.
HI HI..
CONELRAD operated by switching the active carrier of
several radio stations around the country in a random
sequence so that Soviet bombers could not use radio
navigation to locate any specific target for bombing.
I agree that CONELRAD and the whole CD effort, for that
matter, was a total flop. Great PR but a flop never the
less. Growing up just south of Cleveland OH and the later
near Grissom AFB (a SAC base about 60 miles north of
Indianapolis IN I held no expectations of surviving any
nuk attack.
Dave Nagel
WD9BDZ
I'm afraid that 640khz _is_ the correct lower frequency.
Somewhere, buried in some archive, the developmental
documents for Conelrad may still exist and may explain the
choice of frequencies. I think mostly it was to have a
frequency that would be usable for any BC station. I also
don't remember (if I ever knew) the power stations were
supposed to use, I think quite low, perhaps a couple of
hundred watts.
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