Word: ec
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...EC-121's working altitude of 25,000 ft. gives its snooping gear a much wider reach than that of a surface ship like Pueblo. Because many of the signals to be monitored travel in straight lines rather than bending with the earth's curvature, an airborne collector sees a much more distant horizon and can keep signals within range far longer. One EC-121 radar can sweep a 40,000-sq.-mi. area. The plane carries six tons of electronic gear and a crew of 31, large enough to allow technicians and translators to spell each other...
...main sorts of data collected by aircraft of this type are "Comint," for communications intelligence, and "Elint," for electromagnetic intelligence. "Comint" primarily means verbal radio messages while "Elint" covers such nonverbal signals as radar, automatic landing aids and computer traffic. Since the early 1950s, EC-121s have flown the Atlantic and Pacific regularly as radar picket aircraft...
...EC-121 first pinpoints a radar site and then, by analyzing the signal picked up, determines just what that particular radar is used for. The experts can tell whether the radar under observation is meant to warn of possible threats from an enemy, whether it is intended to guide defensive surface-to-air missiles, or whether it is designed to control a network of offensive nuclear weapons. The aircraft's antennas, tuned to a wide range of radio frequencies used in military communications, can overhear conversations between major command posts 200 miles away and thus plot troop movements...
...sending his interceptors aloft and activates all his secret radar equipment to bag this fictitious intruder. Meanwhile, from a distance, the spy plane can carefully monitor everything that is done by the enemy in order to meet the electronically manufactured threat. There is no indication, however, that the downed EC-121 was "exercising...
...also helps to keep the U.S. from getting caught in the kind of nuclear-blackmail situation that would have resulted had photo reconnaissance not turned up the Soviet IRBM installations in Cuba in 1962. Sophisticated electronic satellites have made some of the monitoring flights redundant, but the lumbering EC-121 is still more versatile and reliable, if more vulnerable to attack than a satellite orbiting in space...