¹⁄32

Battle of Britain adversaries

Very nice, glad to see more 32s. The belly tank on the E-4, though, I believe is a later addition than the BoB, no? And what of the guy wires on the Spit? I have not seen those in photos, but I'm sure they're authentic. How common were they?

Hi Bill, Thanks for the kind words. I placed the belly tank on the E-4 honestly because it was supplied in the kit and looked great. I agree, probably not very BoBish though :-) As far as the aerials, I put them on after seeing photos of No 610 Squadron machines with them. I have seen them on other early model Spits as well. My understanding is that they were radio equipment, but that's just a guess. Cheers Jim

Thanks, Jim. I'm in the finishing stages of the Revell Spit kit, and want a BoB plane. The Trumpy kit was a pleasure to build (much more so than the Eduard E-7 which had MAJOR fit issues-- planning to do a build review here).

Excellent work Jim. I didn't think the old Revell Spit could that good.

Thank you very much for those kind words. I can tell you that it did take a LOT of extra work. The cockpit had NO detail and I had to sand off all of the raised panel lines and rescribe them to recessed, a major pain. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it fit and after treating the canopy with Future it looked pretty good. Kinda like that girl you didn't want to take to the prom but asked anyway......she ended up cleaning up pretty good :-)

"Guy wires" are aerials for the IFF system. Steve

Hi, Steve, can you share more about that? I have not seen it on very many photos, but that's probably my shortcoming.

I'll try,I do not claim any expertise in the Spitfire or radio systems! As I understand it the first IFF system worked with the early HF radio system and used the aerial wire associated with that system. This is the wire running from the top of the fin to the mast and then down into the fuselage. Around September 1940 this radio was replaced with a VHS system the TR1133 (I think). The antenna for this was housed within the mast and the fin to mast wire was not required. Also around this time the new IFF system (Mk1?) was introduced. This operated entirely seperate to the radio and it's aerial wires were fixed at the ends of the tailplanes and ran to insulators on the fuselage side usually in the red of the roundel. I'm not sure if all three wires at the same time would actually be a real possibility as I feel that the new IFF system came in after the new radio system. I'll leave that conundrum for someone far more knowledgeable than myself! Cheers Steve

The IFF transponder set was mounted just forward of the Wireless bay behind the cockpit seat armour plate and accessed through the port fuselage access door. It was designed to transmit a special radio identification signal that would be displayed on ground radar screens and so identify the aircraft as friendly. For it to be effective it was important to stop the enemy from discovering how it operated and using it against the Cain Home Air Defence Radar.To accomplish this it was fitted with a detonation system that could be fired manually or self destruct in the event of a crash. In the IFF Mk II system, the aircraft carried a receiver/transmitter that received pluses transmitted by a radar station and re-transmitted them with an inappreciable delay and increased strength. The IFF set periodically swept through the tuning band of the radar station causing the echo on the display to periodically increase in size thus affording a means of identification. This was adequate for the early needs of ground radar but not for later developments and was replaced by the IFF Mk III system. The aircraft still carried a receiver/transmitter but was not stimulated by the pluses from the ground radar station. Instead, at the radar station, special interrogator transmitter/receivers working on a different frequency from the radar detector frequency were operated at will to excite the airborne receiver/transmitter and receive responses from it. Since the pulse recurrence frequency of the interrogator usually bears some simple relationship to that of the radar station, the IFF responses can be displayed along with the normal aircraft echoes. Sometimes a separate IFF display was used. Some form of coding was generally adopted.