You're quite welcome. I'll have to tell the missus, whatzername, that somebody
complimented me on my memory. (^-^)))

Thanks for the nice words.

George Z.

PosterBoy wrote:
"Gooneybird" wrote in message
...
Since I qualify as one of the old timers, this is how it worked as best as
this over the hill WWII airplane driver can remember it:

Try to visualize two intersecting lines creating the form of a cross, which
is the radio range with
its station at the intersection. Each of the opposing quadrants broadcasts
either an "a" or an "n"
in Morse code, i.e.- ".-" or "-." Where the adjacent quadrants come
together, the signals merge
and become a solid tone, which becomes one of the legs of the range. The
merger was never abrupt as
I recall, so if you were flying at right angles to a leg, you heard a clear
"n" as you approached a
leg, and then slowly started to hear a solid tone in the background. The
closer you got to the leg,
the less you were able to hear the "n" until it completely disappeared as you
flew over the leg.
When you started to pick up the "a" over the solid tone of the leg, you were
outbound from the leg.

Let down procedures were published, just as they are now. So, whatever your
heading happened to be,
the first thing you did was to ID the station, which broadcast its unique
identifier in Morse every
minute or so (I don't recall how often). Then, you'd identify the quadrant
you were in, as well as
which leg of the range you were approaching (by the solid tone becoming
louder or lower), each of
which had its own published let down headings and altitudes. Work this out
on a piece of scratch
paper, and I think it'll make more sense to you than just trying to
visualize it from words.

Reverse turns were almost always initially done by flying outbound on a leg,
then a 45 degree turn
(all turns single needle width) either left or right and fly for a minute on
that heading, then a
180 in either direction until the leg was again intercepted, followed by a 45
degree turn to the
inbound heading.

Somewhere along the line, somebody discovered that if you did a 90 degree
turn to the left of the
outbound leg heading and then a 270 to the right as soon as you hit the 90
heading, you'd end up at
the same place inbound on the leg and didn't have to time your outbound leg
after the 45 turn, which
was useful when your clock was inop or at night when your cockpit lighting
wasn't what it should
have been.

When RDBs became available, they simplified the process because you had a
visual pointer to help you
identify the station location, instead of having to rely on the clarity of
audio radio reception
which, when you were far enough from the station and in bad wx or over poor
radio reception terrain,
could be a challenge.

At any rate, after a while, stations were lined up so that their legs were in
what were the
forerunners of airways, so that you could navigate over distances simply by
flying from the legs of
one station on to those of another ahead of you. I once ferried a gooneybird
from the east coast to
someplace near Riverside, Cal. for a major overhaul by flying radio ranges
all the way.

I hope that helped explain how the system worked. I hope I didn't have too
much screwed up, but
it's the best I can do with the memory available to me of details I used 60
years ago or so.

Please feel free with the questions if I've left something muddy or otherwise
unclear. I may or may
not be able to clarify it, but I will try.
George Z.

Well, George....
With a nitpick here or there, I'd say your memory works pretty well !!!
You may be interested to know that as late as the mid-50s, despite USAF's
use of both VOR and ILS, we still had"ADF" and "GCA" stamped on the back of
our Instrument Flight cards (together with VOR 'n ILS) because we gave (and
had to pass, ourselves) the quadrant approach orientation as part of the
annual IFR flight check. It was interesting, espy when you hit the null
cone and wondered if it was station passage or problem with the radio!!.
Thanks for the reminder.

Cheers.