Fighter Attack Squadrons

[GSXRJJordan]

Originally Posted by Brian

^^
Yes.

Do tell more please.
The Electronic Warfare stuff amazes me.
E/A-18 replacing those EA-6s. Cool.

LOL you got pics of the cruise patch?!? That was actually a pretty big deal... the whole "last F14 squadron to deploy" shit. Cool.

As far as the EW equipment I worked on, the most common stuff was chaff dispensers lol, but my 'main job' was to repair all offensive/defensive ECM for the Tomcat and Hornet/Superhornet. The F14s had so much gear that broke though... and everything that came in had to be checked out on this 'test bench' which was literally the oldest piece of equipment on the ship I think. The computer that ran the bench had a 386 chip @ 33MHz running it. OLD.

Anyway, every day you do tests on your test bench, then gear gets given to the ships maintenance department from the squadron... if it has to do with ECM or EA-6B offensive shit they call someone from my shop down to pick it up. We sign for it, inspect it, then run it through a series of tests ~ some of these take like 10 mins, some take hours and hours (to run through the entire signal spectrum of a EA-6B ALQ-99 pod). Super sweet part was once you started the test, you weren't expected to do anything besides watch the test bench (in case the test fails), so you kick back and fall asleep.

Once the box fails a test, you drag out the schematics and try and visually see what's wrong - sometimes you can actually see a burnt out chip or solder trace, which makes deciding what to replace very easy. Most of the time you can't, and you use your best judgement on which component to order - then you wait a couple days for it to get flown out to the ship, replace it, and test it again.

The coolest part for me now is all the work I did on the harnesses between the components (the wires and connectors were the only thing were were qualified to actually work on) gave me a lot of experience that has helped me launch a legit wiring operation with cars. So in that sense, Go Navy.