I'm feeling obsolete!

I worked on tubes and solid state hybrids. We only had a new black and white video camera for surveillence and a personal computer was a state of the art B&W Tandy with a cassette tape.

I noticed that even my old AFSC wasn't listed and I was in the communications group! Wow...where's my cane?

Sgt Papaw

Don't feel too bad. The AF, in its limited institutional wisdom, closed almost all the Wideband (aka Radio Relay) sites in most of Europe. SATCOM was king. Now with this war going on, and we all know that those signals coming off the satellites are quite weak, the big shots have found that it doesn't take much to jam that weak SATCOM signal. The Marine Corps gave Ratheon some money to put together what Raytheon terms "high speed" tropo link to show viability. It was successful. Raytheon calls 20 megabits per second "high speed". I used to work in digital microwave on the civilian side in the 1980s and high speeds was 135-280 megabits per second.

As for tubes, it's been pointed out by seasoned comm veterans that tube type equipment will easily survive the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion. This solid state dainty transistorized stuff will fry easily.

That's why the Russians and the Chinese are still manufacturing tubes and some of their key comm stuff is still tubes.