Uhf Quotes

She's a bright girl. She learned in her thirteenth year that you can get old films of Mae West or Marlene Dietrich (who is a Vulcan; look at the eyebrows) after midnight on UHF if you know where to look, at fourteen that pot helps, at fifteen that reading's even better. She learned, wearing her rimless glasses, that the world is full of intelligent, attractive, talented women who manage to combine careers with their primary responsibilities as wives and mothers and whose husbands beat them. She's put a gold circle pin on her shirt as a concession to club day. She loves her father and once is enough. Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?) and caretakers of childhood; everyone knows that a large part of a woman's identity inheres in the style of her attractiveness. Laur is daydreaming. She looks straight before her, blushes, smiles, and doesn't see a thing... Laur is daydreaming that she's Genghis Khan.

There was no way out of this; the Col was upset for the moment.  I’d seen this before and even if I confessed that it was my fault that I’d created the thunderstorm this morning just to halt flight operations it wouldn’t have mattered so I decided to take a chance and break this up while hopefully maintaining a straight face.      “Well Sir it’s a highly technical problem that has to do with electricity and humidity.”      “WHAT technical problem with electricity and humidity?!”      “Well Sir, it’s the Geeblefarbs.”      “GEEBLEFARBS?!!  What the fuck are Geeblefarbs?”      “Well Sir, they are little microscopic things that ‘Geeble’ down the electrical wires transporting the Ohms that make the electrical stuff work.  When they get wet or it’s really humid outside the Ohms pick up moisture and  swell up, which causes the Geeblefarbs to get too fat and they can’t ‘Geeble’ down the wires and when that happens the things like the UHF radio, TACAN and other electrical equipment just won’t work.”      Now I’ve known other officers who weren’t very mechanically inclined and never curious enough to really know if this was a true technical explanation or not.  I also knew that with those types of people if you said something like this in an authoritative manner that they would simply say, “Oh” and go on to another subject, but I knew Col Psaros (Big George) better than that.      “Geeblefarbs and fat Ohms, you’ve got to be shitting me!”      “I am Sir.”      “You gonna fix this problem we are having, quickly, I hope.”      “Yes Sir, it’s in work now, weather aside, we will be ready to go in about 1 hour.

243.0 megacycles, known as Guard channel, which all airplanes with UHF kept tuned in for emergency use. The USAF called that frequency Navy Common. The Navy jocks said it was Air Force Common. The Marines could not have cared less.

I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymbals. Not that I want to say it isn't music.

disrupted by the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear weapon. If Green Pine was knocked out, SAC brought online in October 1967 the first of twelve Emergency Rocket Communication Systems (ERCS) at Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base. Instead of a warhead, the special ERCS Minuteman missiles contained a powerful UHF transmitter that would broadcast launch orders to U.S. forces along the missile’s trajectory, creating, in effect, a high-flying radio broadcasting tower. The launch capsules of the 510th were retrofitted with large, floor-mounted telephone consoles that the crews quickly dubbed “knee knockers,” since they hit their knees on it whenever turning their chairs. With the arrival of ERCS, the very last remnants of the U.S. government in a nuclear war would have likely been the voices of the missileers of Whiteman’s 510th Missile Squadron. In an emergency, the crews would use the console to record launch orders onto the ERCS transmitter (the airborne command posts could record an Emergency Action Message remotely). Then either the capsule crew or an airborne command post would have launched the missiles, each set on a different trajectory to blast in a different direction. For thirty minutes after launch, ERCS-equipped Minutemans would broadcast “go codes” to any bomber, submarine, or missile silo along its path, the last communication of a destroyed