"Old School" RTTY Equipment on the Battleship Iowa

Sorry I didn't take more pix of the gear, but I snapped these few after I finished photographing the six HF antennas on the ship.

I took the pix of the antennas so I could document them by their nameplates, and we could compare the what and where of them to the scanty drawings we have.

ANYWHOO....this is a representative of one of the four or five AN/UGC-48A machines abord the Iowa.

This particular one is working perfectly, and has an almost full roll of paper in it.

I am NOT an expert on these by any means, so I can't tell you much about it. In one of my older posts about the equipment in the Comm Center I have a ton of pictures of the RTTY gear, the printers and reperferators, and the CRT-based Data Terminals, which I found out the other day are in working condition. We're trying to find some of the magnetic tape cartridges for them, and supposedly there is a box or two of them stored somewhere on the ship, but this equipment is not on my "TO-DO" list, as I'm more concerned with getting our last non-functioning Watkins-Jenkins AN/URR-74(V)2 receiver working, and learning to replace the chain drives in the 1051 receivers, and the ART-23 exciters.

Nameplate:

Top covers opened:

Close-up of Print Head:

Paper Tape Mechanism:

2nd Tape Mechanism:

2nd Tape Mechanism:

It's definitely neat stuff, but not really in my "knowledge base"!