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Visited the Pima Air Museum and spotted a weird antenna setup on a C-130
I was walking around the static display area last weekend and saw an old C-130 with a VHF blade antenna mounted right next to a UHF one on the fuselage. The spacing was maybe only 8 inches apart, which seemed way too close. I asked one of the volunteer docents about it, and he said it was a field mod from the 80s that caused constant interference issues. Has anyone else run into vintage airframes with oddball antenna placements that just don't make sense?
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oliver_mitchell2mo ago
My buddy worked on a C-130 that had this weird HF antenna setup where they just taped the wire to the outside of the tail with electrical tape. This was in the early 2000s not even the 80s, so you'd think they'd know better by then. The tape kept peeling off and the wire would slap against the fuselage every time they hit turbulence. They finally found a roll of proper antenna mount clips in the back of a supply closet that had been sitting there since the Vietnam era. The whole thing was just a mess of quick fixes that never got fixed right. Makes you wonder how many other airframes out there are flying around with half-baked field mods that nobody wants to mess with.
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emerychen2mo ago
My buddy works on old warbirds and told me about a B-25 with its HF antenna wire running right through the gun turret's rotation path. They kept getting shorts until someone finally traced the issue back to a 70 year old field repair. Some of those old fixes just created new problems down the line.
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Actually that's a really common find on those old birds! The HF antenna wire usually runs outside the fuselage, not through the turret well. Sounds like someone might have rerouted it during a patch job, maybe after battle damage. Those quick fixes in the field were just meant to get them flying again, not last 80 years.
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