Originally posted by RobG: Thanks! The folks at Temora were talking about the possibility of making a replica Mosquito but I doubt that they ever will. Australia acquired a number of them which were housed at Temora at the end of the war. They were fitted with a smaller version of Barnes Wallis' bouncing bomb and were intended for use attacking large naval ships. It's sad that a few more examples of each type in Australia at the end of the war weren't preserved.
I wondered if anyone would notice the Link trainer!
It seems like using the LF was a lot harder than contemporary ILS beacons?
Isn't there still a Mossie in NZ? I've seen video of one flying around Auckland.
LF lives on in the guise of LORAN, which was fitted to aircraft and ships, the problem with aircraft was that as they got faster the accuracy of the nav system dropped off. Because the LF system has such long wavelengths the granularity of position data was a bit rough, so in fast moving aircraft by the time you worked out where you were you weren't there anymore!
I was trained on Decca Navigator, similar to LORAN and they both came under the heading of "hyperbolic navigation". Special maps were required showing the arcs of the radio signals from the different beacons, tune to three separate beacons and you got three different arcs, where they intersected was where you were! Had to show a Hercules Navigator how to work it once, it was still fitted but he'd never been shown how to use it even though he carried the maps.
I heard that big ships like supertankers still use LORAN, it's a reliable system but not as accurate as GPS. Of course if GPS ever gets jammed or goes down a lot of people are going to be in trouble.....
