Three Echo Niner

General Schoomaker directs that soldiers will be "riflemen first, specialists second", presumably because of the ambush of the 507 Maintenance Company in Iraq.

If you think it can't happen to you, fellow 3E9, you are deceiving yourself. Take a long look at the marksmanship skills the Air Force has given you so far, and ask yourself whether those skills suffice.

You may be on an airbase when deployed, and that airbase will be surrounded by the Ring of Fire provided by our esteemed SF colleagues. But a US aircraft downed off-base might require you to leave the protection of the base, with nothing but a thin layer of SF and other DCG members covering you and each other. You'd either convoy out to the incident site (think "507th"), or chopper over (think "Blackhawk Down").

In a crisis, you do not rely on instinct, you default to your level of training. If you think that level of training is not sufficient for the conflict (40 rounds a year sighting in and 40 more to qualify, prone/sitting/offhand, is not), who do you push to get more?

I'm fortunate to have attended a commerically operated shooting school (sorry, this link is broken at press time), though I paid with my own funds, back when I was a single man with no mortgage. That was 11 years ago, and such skills don't "come back to you like riding a bicycle."

Your training regimen ought to bust about 40 caps a week. That's not even two full magazines. And to my knowledge there are no places on the typical AF installation where you can schedule your own practice time, on or off duty, at AF expense or your own, using an AF weapon or your own. That is what it will take.

Surely you've had some idea that makes your job easier or faster, and you want to find a way to share it. This is your place.

For instance, this is an idea posted on another weblog, for a low-cost automated liquid agent detector.

US and NATO forces already possess a very effective and inexpensive . . . detector paper that changes color when it is contacted with suspected chemical agents. . . .
Measuring droplet size [of the falling chemical agent] is key to determining a few important parameters . . .
use a long ribbon of this paper, say 10cm wide . . . in a machine that exposes a 10x10cm window of this ribbon at any moment, horizontally facing the sky, advancing the ribbon about 20mm a minute. . . . under a color scanner . . . A color change trips an alarm.

The author got a bit carried away with his idea, but pay no attention to that. Look instead at the potential of the weblog as a tool to stimulate conversations among our career field members on how to improve the gear or procedures we use now.

Acoustic Wave is a trademark of the Bose Corporation. Nothing in this post is intended to endorse that company or its products.
A protective field mask is made mostly of rubber. This material is very good at absorbing vibrations.

The human voice is a pattern of vibrations. The rubber is very good at absorbing them too. The voicemitters mounted on protective field CBR masks are supposed to improve the transmission of the wearer's voice through the mask, but the rubber still deadens much of it. You've all seen it, and worse, you've heard it: a temper tent full of MOPPed up people muff-muffing at each other through these masks, or blaring at each other with battery-powered voice projection units fastened on the masks.

Most of the power of the human voice happens in frequencies below 300 cycles (vibrations) per second, abbreviated by engineers as Hertz, Hz. There's very little power behind the human voice up at the higher end of the range of human hearing, say 3,300 Hz, but that's where most of the intelligibility is---how you tell the consonants p, t, and k apart, for example. Telephones don't transmit any frequency higher than that.

Mask voicemitters work OK at the higher frequencies, because they don't need a physically large component to vibrate at that frequency to transfer the sound out of the mask. The higher the frequency of the sound, the smaller the part should be to conduct it.

It's the low frequencies that suffer with a field CBR mask, those frequencies that give the human voice its carrying power. Masks suffer the same problems that early transistor radios did: the speaker, due to size limitations, could emit high frequencies well, but it would muddle or weaken low frequencies.

The solutions applied to this problem so far have been electronic, and they suffer the same problem too. The voice projection unit has a small speaker (the largest the engineers could pack into a unit that size, but still small), which reproduces only the high frequencies well. Plus the added weight on the wearer's face, and the battery consumption.

It was my fortune to inherit from my father a Bose Acoustic Wave countertop radio. You've probably seen them on display in airports, or on TV. They're physically small radios, much smaller than the average boom box. Its bass (low-frequency) response is incredible; it can rattle a jewelry box off the nightstand. Despite the small size of the radio itself, it can squeeze out good bass performance by using a tube that folds back upon itself a number of times, so its length is long enough to resonate effectively at those low frequencies. Bose patented this technology, and applied the Acoustic Wave trademark to it, but all it is, is a cleverly designed tube, whose length is proportionate to the low frequencies they want to boost, coiled up to fit in a small radio enclosure. There's no added electronics, no batteries or wires or such, just an empty tube.

So why can't the manufacturer of the mask license this technology from Bose, to build a tube of the right dimensions, shaped to wrap around the front voicemitter of the mask, or even the eyelenses? It would look something like this on an MCU-2 series:


It would have to be made of hard material, maybe translucent plastic as sketched above, and be kept light and flat. For all we know, some clever engineer could design it as an add-on that bolts to the front voicemitter ring, or replaces the eyelens outsert entirely for the MCU. If it gets broken or contaminated, throw it away for a new one. It would use no batteries.

The hard part would be to couple the low frequency sounds directly from inside the mask into this Acoustic Wave tube. As an add-on part, it might not perform as well as it could, because the front voicemitter still is in the way, and it isn't optimized for bass response. Rather, we're talking about a replacement for the front voicemitter in its entirety, which is not a unit-level modification like a snap-on part would be. The masks would have to ship to a factory to be modified and retested, then returned to inventory.

At the glacial rate of military acquisitions, we could expect to see this mod to the MCU-2 mask about the time the second wave of JSGPMs ships. But what about engineering this feature into the JSGPM while it's still on the drawing-board?

An email account is now set up for any readers who would like to contribute content to this weblog. Please send a plain-text email to editor[dot]3echo9[at]earthlink[dot]net and give us a brief summary of your background. Years in the career field, active versus Guard or Reserve, retired, if you are from the Two-Four-Two era, prior career field if applicable, how many times you've worked with Bert Cline, and so forth.
Note that the actual dot and at-symbol were replaced in the address shown in the paragraph above. Folks, spammers make software that crawl over every web page they can find, 'harvesting' email addresses. Don't put your real email address on a web page or you'll get some Amazing Offers. I don't think the bots have figured this dodge out yet.

What happens is we'll program the weblog software to send you an email with an invitation and instructions to plug yourself in and be able to write posts. You will not be able to write posts without emailing that address. You will of course be free to write comments on other peoples' posts.

As presently configured, this weblog can display images, such as JPEGged photos, GIFs, TIFFs, and so forth. However, there's no place to store them. If you have an image to show here, the best (well, the only) way to do it is for you to make sure that image is on the Internet somewhere already, and give the URL of it to one of the people who post on Three Echo Niner. They will compose a post that shows the URL, and also can crack the picture open and show it. Here's an example:

A perfectly beautiful MCU-2/P mask, in near-mint condition. The actual file containing that picture is sitting on a free (ad-supported) web site somewhere else. This post merely goes to that web site and brings a copy of the photo back here to this window whenever you load this web page.

If the image is not already on the Internet, it needs to be loaded somewhere, so we can link to it. That's how we have to do it here.

Of course, if this web log were sponsored and operated by USAF, and hosted on their network, we'd have space to store the photos and we wouldn't have to go through this exercise.

A hit counter is installed in this web log. It tells you how many times this web log has been read. See the little multicolored box labeled "Site Meter" at the bottom of the page? The number above it is how many times the page has been loaded. This counter can collect more statistics than that, such as where, generally, the hits come from. This service is also free, provided by another company that offers more powerful versions of it for profit.

A guestbook might be installed here soon, if I can find a free one.

Comments are an especially powerful feature, where you can talk back to this weblog. Each post has a link at the bottom, labeled "Comment" with a little counter beside it showing how many other people have written comments already. You can hit that link to open a new window. At top, you get to read the comments of those who have already commented, and at the bottom you can add your own comments.

If someone's comments are out of line, we can delete them, and either warn him or shut him out of comments permanently.

Use it, carefully.

This is the launch of a web log I've been suggesting to a few people for months now. A weblog is like a journal, with entries added chronologically.

Problem Statement. Our career field depends upon constant updates about regulations, changes to technical orders, serviceability and lot number data, inspection criteria, and so forth, and the only way to get this information out to the community is through emails. These emails are aimed at long distribution lists maintained on countless individual computers, or standardized email distribution lists maintained by organizations. The problem is that if the email stimulates a discussion, or prompts a question from the field, or reminds someone of a joke or an exercise, the emails begin bouncing back and forth across the Internet and quickly fill up everybody's Outlook inboxes. What should have been gold becomes lead.

We can't be the only career field to suffer this problem. But we can be the first to think outside the box and slough this problem aside. The weblog can do this. Just hit this site every few days to see what new has occurred.

CONOPS. Each article placed on the weblog is known as a "post." Each post has a link at the bottom that, if you click it, opens up a new smaller window, where you can type in a comment or a question. Every other reader gets to see your question, and if somebody has an answer, he or she can use the same comment feature to add it in.

This weblog is set up to keep only the posts for the last seven days on its front page. When a post gets over seven days old, the weblog moves it to an archive page that shows all the articles for that calendar month. A list of all the monthly archive pages appears over to the side, so you can read the back issues whenever you want.

If you see a post here that interests someone else, you don't have to email the whole web to him or her, or copy and paste the part you want him or her to see. Each post has a unique uniform resource locator---a permanent web address---that you can copy and send in an email. The person reading the email can hit that link and come right here and read it, unadulterated, no middleman. Look at the timestamp at the bottom of this post: that's the link I'm talking about. Right click on it, copy it to clipboard, and paste it where you want it.

I'm the webmaster, I built it, but I'll step back and let many other members of the career field to contribute. I don't want to be the star, just the geek behind the scenes.

Code of Conduct. There will be ground rules, mostly the usual rules that follow from professional military conduct. We will ruthlessly remove posts and comments that cross the boundaries that military conduct implies.

OPSEC. This is a public 'blog, meaning anybody who has the web address for this 'blog can point his browser to it and read it. We have the option to take it private---still hosted by Blog*Spot, the company that offers the web space here for free, ad-supported, and the software to create it---so you'd have to identify yourself to Us before you could read it. I'd rather get more people to come here and to post here, before trying that.

Purpose and Scope. But ultimately, I want to sell the USAF on using this concept on a dot-mil network, where we need not concern ourselves with having the public looking in and possibly hacking us.

LIMFACS. Some dot-mil networks may block this address because weblogs are more commonly used for the purposes of posting opinion pieces, news and commentary, reviews of books and movies, even a teenager's dating experiences . . . not necessarily the stuff employers want entering their networks from the wide open spaces. All the more reason, in my opinion, for us to give it a fair shot when and where we can read it, to sell The Brass on the idea that a weblog is more efficient and less troublesome than an email list at distributing the kind of information we exchange among us today.