Oral History Gallery

Extract Text (Duration01.33)

A lot of the traditional skills went missing, and there was a reliance on satellite after a while and that was one of the big things that we noticed, was that there was quickly skill fade. All that training that you'd had was all geared towards using long-haul communications and all of a sudden the satellite was so much easier that you realised that there was a great reliance on the satellite system, everybody loved using it. The way that you received your signals was largely unchanged. Submarines use very low frequencies, the broadcasts are at slow speed and the signals come in on the teleprinter and it's all pretty standard. It was the ability to transmit signals to shore that had changed. But of course the danger there was that if the satellite system should be unavailable, for whatever reason, and you had to revert to long-haul communications, it quickly became apparent that there was massive skill fade. And what I'm saying there is that when it didn't work, the one time when I was actually on Renown there was only myself and the radio supervisor, who was our senior rate, our superior, who actually could remember how to send signals to shore by the old methods. The reliance on satellite had become almost total, and it did actually cause a letter to be written warning or advising submarine crews to actually continue to train in the old… what they were quickly becoming called the legacy systems, for that very reason, that there had become too much reliance in a single system, satellite comms.