They bristle with what appear to be 4 to 8 large whip type antenna(s) per vehicle ? Why so many? Won’t one or two do? Are the frequencies the military broadcasts on so low they need these giant CB style whip antenna?
Or is there more to it?
If they’re all the same size and type, it might be for purposes of directional locating puropses, like the four Lojack antennae found on police cars. Otherwise it might be for different bands used for various communications. Or they could be used as an antenna array using combinations of passive and active elements to produce perfomance increases in gain or directionality.
Oh, and long antennae don’t necessarily equate to low frequency. There are types of antennae called “colinear” which are essentially stacked arrays with each part fed in phase to increase gain. My Collins Ringo Ranger 2m antenna is about 9 feet long, though a 2m wave is a bit over 6 feet.
The 32 foot whip is for vehicle mounted high powered HF transmissions, only used while static. AN/MRC-138, if I recall. Other vehicles may have both a data and voice channel (VHF) operating simultaneously, with two seven foot whip antenna. Some vehicles may carry both HF and VHF radios to speak upwards and downwards on two different nets.
While Q.E.D.'s first post may make sense from a certain sense, I have never heard of such a thing on tactical military vehicles. The more antenna, the higher paygrade inside the vehicle, is a good rule of thumb.
I was a commo (communications) guy in the Army and this information may have changed since I left.
Many of the radios in a company (intra-squad and intra-platoon)or battalion are line-of sight. The higher the antenna the farther they can communicate. When you have elements of a company or battalion spread out over a 50-100 mile area it’s important that you are able to communicate with all of them.
There are also different nets that they operate on. Usually you will find seperate nets for a squad and platoon (depending on the misson), along with a company net and in some cases a battalion net. Instead of having to switch frequencies to communicate with each element there will be a seperate radio for each net. Each radio requires it’s own antenna.
This is how we operated within my battalion, but with the advances of technology in the last few years this has probably changed.
Like Convict I was in the communications field, air traffic control specifically, in the Army. A flight-following HMMWV (uh, Humvee for you non-military types) full of controllers would have a SINCGARS (encrypted frequency-hopping FM radio) radio, two FM radios for the military networks, a HF for air traffic control, a couple of FM’s for ATC, and a couple of AM’s for ATC. And every radio had its own antenna.
Most of the “normal” Hummers, though, had no radios, and the “important” ones only had one or two FM radios – RT-524 if I remember correctly – ususually the captain’s vehicle (company commander [captain] and first officer [1/2LT] were usually the only officers we ever saw, other than pilots).
If you want to see a big antenna, look for a fixed-installation non-directional-beacon.
I was a signalman in the Royal Firebreathing Danish Army, and I concur: Lots of antennas = Important Target. Even a lowly platoon commander’s vehicle would have two antennas, one for platoon net and one for company net. Higher command patches in & out of other nets all the time - plus, of course, there’s specialized nets for forward observers, medevac and supply/recovery, to name a few.
My vehicle (platoon commander’s APC) would quite often have two observers with their own radios standing in the hatch, as well as the two fixed antennae. Could be really fun when you’re listening to the company CO issuing orders over one radio while your platoon commander is using the other to move his own units - and you’re expected to be able to remember and correlate the contents of both information streams.
Yes indeed.