The Design of the Radio Receiving Room and Transmitter Room:The radio receiving room was located forward on the boat deck. This was close to and forward of the 736 Club - which later became the Queens Grill.
The transmitter room was located further aft in the superstructure at the base of the funnel.
These rooms were planned by IMRC (International Marine Radio Company) who had operated the previous two Queens. The design was difficult due to some constraints by the designers of the ship and other operational factors!
Radio Receiving RoomLayout: The room was approximately 23 Feet (7 metres) square. There were two operating consoles installed on the starboard side of the room with two central large desks. On the port side was a bench and two racks with RTTY and Piccolo equipment.
See also Radio Room Equipment topicOperating ConsolesI have numbered the operating consoles Console 1 to 5 from left to right.
As installed initially there were four operating consoles however at some time later another console was installed which I have called “Console 3”.
The consoles were cleverly designed so that up to 4 radio officers could operate simultaneously from a seated position or alternately two radio officers operate the same equipment also from a seated position. This was achieved by the forward and aft vertical Console 1 and 5 being able to be rotated either inwards or turned to face the port side. In practice the consoles were not often rotated as usually 4 radio officers would not be seated.
Each console had an HF/MF receiver, transmitter remote control and exciter. There was also an audio distribution panel.
The consoles had a switch box enabling selection of headphones and morse key to any transmitter. It is to the side of the vertical consoles and mounted at an angle in the desktop of the fixed consoles.
The transmitter selection of band and frequency or channel being shown by an annunciator panel mounted on the starboard bulkhead beneath the local time clock. In practice this was not used much!
Each operating position had an Olympia typewriter to type up radio traffic as received by morse code.
HF/MF Receivers The receivers were all located and operated in the radio room The receiver antennas themselves were wire antennas which went up to the forward mast used for signalling flags. There was also one receive notch antenna.
Two standard IMR SR401 marine receivers were installed in Console 2 and 4. These were not digital readout.
In order for QE2 to have the best equipment it was equipped with the new HF GEC-Marconi RC410 receiver or possibly RC411 (includes LF). These were installed in Console 1 and 5. By 1985 these GEC RC410 receivers had been removed and replaced with Skanti R5001 receivers.
HF/MF Transmitter ExcitersEach console had a STR1400 Crystal Controlled exciter. Digital frequency readout exciters would come later ! There were two knobs, band control and channel/frequency.
Band control this selected a band from 4, 8, 12, 16, and 22 Marine bands
The Frequency Knob had a selection of 15 frequency for each band being selected frequencies from the allocated band of frequencies for :-
Radiotelegraphy (morse)Calling and Hi Traffic Working frequencies, Radiotelephone frequencies,
Direct printing (RTTY)frequencies,
Wide band Facsimile and special system frequencies.
In addition Console 4 which controlled the STR1400 had MF frequencies available.
Audio Distribution UnitAn Audio Distribution Unit was installed in each console. This contained switches to select the audio input to the relevant console transmitter. This had a selection of audio from the Operator, Telephone Exchange, RTTY, Piccolo and Plessey Racks together with any necessary PTT (Press to Talk ) control function.
It also switched receiver audio into any equipment associated with the above.
Additional functions for Radiotelephone such as Privacy(Speech Inversion) and Lincompex could also be switched into circuit.
Radio Telephone - CircuitsThe QE2 had a number of telephone operators located in another part of the ship. The radio room’s function was to provide a radiotelephone circuit to the telephone operators who arranged all the telephone calls. However the circuits did need to be monitored to make sure of the quality of the circuit was maintained.
Whilst QE2 was on liner service across the North Atlantic it was common to operate two radiotelephone circuits – one to the UK and one to the USA. Thus requiring two 1kw transmitters to be available for service
Radio Telephone – LincompexLincompex was a way of improving the quality of radiotelephone calls by compressing the audio on transmission and expanding the audio on receipt. The amount of compression and expansion being controlled by data on a control channel to the side of the audio frequencies. This worked well on point to point circuits and there was a great publicity about using it on QE2. It was tested successfully on the Cunard ship Carmania off the west coast of Africa. It was believed these tests using equipment with the control channel outside the normal audio channel. However this was against maritime regulations and when installed on the QE2 the control channel had to be inside the audio band and restricting the audio bandwidth. This meant the control channel was subject to interference. The result was disastrous and the quality of the resultant radiotelephone calls was often poor and the Lincompex switched out!
When visited in 1985 the Lincompex units had been removed.
Radiotelephone Calls – Privacy UnitA simple speech inversion unit was installed to give some privacy to radiotelephone calls from eavesdropping! This was used when possible but could not be used on Lincompex circuits!
VHF RadiotelephonesThere were two STR60 VHFs installed initially and they could be used for Radphone calls. Later an STR65 was installed in the console
Marisat/InmarsatIn 1977 Comsat General 3055 Marisat Terminal was installed.
When visited in 1985 the Inmarsat satellite communications system was in use to make some radiotelephone calls and to receive data at 1200 bps ( bits per second) using a modem.
Radio Teleprinter EquipmentIn more recent time nearly all ships use what is called SITOR ( Simplex Teleprinter Over Radio) to carry radio telex traffic to and from the ship. However when the QE2 was designed this was not in general use. Most marine teleprinter traffic was carried out with straight RTTY equipment using FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) with no error correction.
The QE2 radio room had a rack on the port side with RTTY equipment. A recently found photo shows the rack contained two Eddystone receivers with Crystal channel units used in space diversity mode.
The model of the FSK Modulators/Demodulators is not clear. Possibly the FSK units were made by the USA company Northern Radio.
This equipment in the early days carried most of the radiotelegrams from the UK. The equipment received and sent traffic from the two Creed 444 teleprinters one of which was installed on the port side just beyond the entrance door. If necessary the teleprinters were used to type up 5 unit code punch tape which was then sent when the circuit was working.
As there was no error correction on RTTY the traffic was at time corrupted and required re-runs of radiotelegrams.
When visited in 1985 the ship used a normal Marine Sitor system to send or receive radiotelegrams. This was probably Marconi Specta equipment.
Equipment to Receive the Daily Telegraph on board dailyOn previous liners a ships newspaper was received on board by a radio officer typing up a morse code transmission. The QE2 wanted to change this and daily produce a special edition of the Daily Telegraph prepared by them. Prior to the voyage the ship had onboard photos of current events as well as articles and adverts. The news itself was sent overnight in a data stream as a series of newspaper columns and headlines to be fed directly to the Addressograph Multigraph printing equipment.
To receive the Daily Telegraph data two types of equipment were installed, a Piccolo system and a Plessey ARQ Error Correction system.
Piccolo SystemPiccolo 1 is a radio communications mode using 32 different audio tones where each tone is a different letter. The piccolo name is from the very distinctive audio sound over the radio!
This was a complete British Embassy Piccolo type rack complete with the following:-
-Racal Aerial Pre-selector
-HF Eddystone 830/7 receiver modified with the local oscillator fed from an accurate digital frequency generator for the local oscillator.
-Digital frequency Generator with selectable frequencies.
-Piccolo 1(32 Tone)Demodulator unit. Probably made by Racal
Adjacent a Siemens Teleprinter (possibly T68)
By 1985 the Piccolo equipment has been removed.
Plessey PT200 SitorThis was a system of ARQ (Automatic Repeat request) system using 7 unit code where each unit is coded to detect errors. If an error is received it automatically requests a repeat. Details of this were not known but a recently found article about Portishead Radio states this to an early version of SITOR.
Neither the Plessey or Piccolo proved completely reliable and took many hours of work to get a copy of the QE2 version of the Daily Telegraph.
Emergency Operation of the Radio RoomBy regulation each ship radio room has to be capable of transmitting and receiving in an emergency for 6 hours even if the main power of the ship has failed. How this was achieved in the QE2 was by regarding the transmitter room as the emergency radio room, where emergency batteries were installed to power an emergency/reserve transmitter and receiver. The transmitter was initially most likely an IMR Type 113.
To operate the main HF/MF transmitter from the transmitter room necessitated carrying a receiver and also ST1400 transmitter exciter if HF required, from the forward Radio Room to the Transmitter Room. Then removing the removing the remote actuators from the IMR ST1400 1kW installed transmitter to allow manual operation! Alternately just to use the reserve/emergency MF transmitter IMR 113.
Auto-alarm – Redifon AL29A radiotelegraph auto-alarm is a radio equipment to sound an alarm if the emergency auto-alarm signal of 4 of the 12 long dashes with 1 second spaces transmitted on 500 kHz is received.
By regulation QE2 was a Class 1 H24 ship requiring continuous watch on the emergency frequency of 500 kHz and should not have needed an auto-alarm. However as radio staff may often be distracted by so many things happening, an auto-alarm receiver was fitted and operated continually to ensure an emergency was not missed.
The auto-alarm was mounted on the forward end of the starboard bulkhead to the right of the radio room clock in the corner.
Muirhead K220 Photo Transmitter and K99 FSK TransmitterThis equipment was used to transmit photos from the ship to the shore. This was mainly for newspapers and publicity. A publicity photo was taken of myself using the equipment on the maiden voyage!
Radio WorkshopTo help with the maintenance function a small radio workshop with test equipment was located next to the radio room.
HF/MF ALE Transceiver and AutotelexWhen visited in 1985 an ITT STR910 ALE (Automatic Link Establishment) transceiver with MX900 Scanning Autotelex had just been installed. This is capable of automatically scanning 21 frequencies. If the correct selective call it receives it brings up the transmitter on the correct frequency and replies automatically, accepting the traffic. Outgoing traffic is sent without technical assistance.
It was not clear how the unit was installed and whether the receiver was separate from the transmitter – regarded as essential for QE2 operation. Also it is not clear how well this system worked.
This type of system is now common on ships and helped to remove the need for radio officers.
