"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:
"bob haller" wrote in message
Theres no reason a crew couldnt communicate often with their family.

Other than risking the security of the sub.

Keep in mind that hal regards PR and appearance far higher than actual
performance.

Well of course?


As the idea was to basically "leave port and not be seen again until we
get
home" the more time you spend at com depth, the greater risk you have of
exposing your position and what you're doing.

Keep in mind that since SSBN's were configured to receive The Word
24/7, and that The Word was never sent, there was a great deal of
unused bandwidth.

My understanding is that at station depth the only real signal the SSBNs
could get was the ELF (?) signal which was on the order of bits per second?

i.e. it made a 300 baud modem look fast. So, assuming 30 bits/second, or
roughly 4 ASCII characters/second. 240 characters per minute.

Hm, yeah, I guess that's higher than I initially thought.

Given the great deal of bandwidth unused, it was easy to send such
messages to the boat.

This was actually a measure to *increase* security. Even if you can't
read someone's messages, knowing who is talking to who, and how much,
and when, can give valuable indicators that Something is Up. (This is
called traffic analysis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
.) To prevent the black hats from deriving this information from the
tempo and volume on the SSBN broadcast, the 'cast was kept going 24/7.

Hmm, makes perfect sense. You can separate the wheat from the chaff, but
presumably the enemy can't, so they never know if the actual content of the
signal is changing.


This doesn't of course apply to SSN's which weren't/aren't on 24/7
alert, and pick up their messages by coming to periscope depth at
intervals and snagging their messages from SSIXS.

Even then I'd think the ones on patrol would tend to stay hidden enough to
track and surprise the enemy.


Transmissions from a submarine are of course a great security risk,
and are thus restricted.

Obviously. Though I wouldn't be surprised if Bob thought this was somehow
unfair to the families who couldn't hear from their loved ones on a daily
basis. :-/



D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.