Post Radschool

Opinions expressed in this Newsletter, unless marked otherwise, are entirely those of the writer - Trevor Benneworth. This newsletter is not affiliated with, nor does it purport to be associated with any other organisation.

We warmly welcome your input, and should you have an opinion contrary to or perhaps you agree with any article published here, please express your thoughts to us in writing, and we will gladly publish them.

Stand by your beds!

Look what they've done to the once mighty scope!!

Shortly after our articles on that most useful of tools - the mighty scope iron, we received the following. Unfortunately, we don’t remember who sent it in, for that we’re sorry, but thanks anyway…..

"After reading a recent newsletter, I thought I'd tell you one of my experiences with the Scope. In the mid 60's I was a member of 36Sqn (who were flying the old 3-bladed C130A Hercules). In those days (before Toolboards), we were each issued with our own individual tool-boxes - mine contained a Scope iron. One day, a low-down mongrel decided to pinch my trusty scope and, as you can imagine, I was devastated.

Being a typical singlie (wine, women and songs), I could not afford to buy another one to replace the stolen scope so I resorted to ingenuity. I managed to scrounge some form of transformer which roughly looked like a scope tranny. I then found an old broom handle and cut the appropriate length to form the handle of a "new" scope and painted it black. I then inserted a length of steel rod into one end of the handle and secured it with Araldite. I also glued a copper scope tip onto the end on the rod. Into the other end of the piece of broom handle, I glued a length of cable and then attached it to the tranny. Bloody brilliant - the Equippo's will never know!!!

I then returned to the "Scope" to the store - excellent idea as it was then not part of my AIU. I waited a few days then submitted a demand for a new scope iron. After I received my new scope, I realised the BIG mistake I had made when returning my bodgie scope was that I attached a Serviceable tag to it instead of a U/S tag. My "new" scope was my bodgie one!!!! I was right-the Equippo’s didn’t know…..In the words of that Toyota advert - "Bugga".!!!

A few week's later, I repeated the process (but with a U/S tag this time) and eventually received my brand new scope - bliss!!!"

We sure got some queer answers to our last competition, which we thought was a breeze. We selected it because it was a bit of a radioey sort of question, and we reckoned it would stump all the sumpies and framies, and give all the queer traders a leg up. The question was: "What is back porch?". Simple right? and the correct answer was of course B, the answer which had the pulses and sync stuff in it, though we haven’t the faintest idea what it means. Some blokes reckoned it was answer A the one where you put your boots, but they got all confused with a back veranda, some blokes reckoned it was where you put the outboard on a boat, close, so we included them, and some of the geeks reckoned it was the stuff you put inside a cathode ray tube, which we think is what they call a TV screen. Any-way, the whole thing was too close to call, so we bunged all the names in a hat and drew one out, and the lucky winner is, Julie Peters, who used to be Julie Brown at Radschool where through a bit of study and a lot of good luck she became a Telsop. We contacted Armaguard and they send 10 armed men and a bullet proof truck to pick up the bottle of Sparkling Rinegolde, and it’s now pride of place at the Peters’ household, along with the Certificate of Merit which now hangs over Julie’s bed.

Now to this edition’s question. We thought that as we’re all ex military people, fearless and trained defenders of the nation that we were, we thought we’d make it a war question. We realise there probably weren’t too many of us around at the time (Toby Paine probably was), but back on the 19 February, 1942, 242 Japanese aircraft attached Darwin. On that day, there were 2 separate raids, and it was the first time that the Australian Flag received enemy fire. The question is:

How many bombs were dropped on Darwin on the 19 February 1942, was it :-

a. 236
b. 456
c. 685
d. 997.

This is a hard one so we’ve included a sort of subliminal clue, but we won’t tell you what the clue is, you’ll have to work it out. Email your answer to us (please don’t ring), and you too could be the envy of your suburb. Entries should be in by end of June 2002, and don’t forget - Judge’s decision etc etc. Go to it.

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