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Does it have anything to do with sending audio waves – or some type of wave? Could potentially be some type of primitive radar.
Next clue, If nobody gets it I will tell you. They were both devices used by the air defense forces. I had read about both but never seen one in real life until a few weeks ago.
The first one is a kind of sound locator: Before radar, the first practical means of detecting airplanes at a distance at night was by listening to the noise of their engines with the aid of horns.The second one is part of a searchlight radar from the outset, a short-range, height-finding unit expressly designed for fixed antiaircraft defenses such as coastal batteries or other static positionsMore details here: http://www.skylighters.org/howalightworks/I can hear you weeping ... 8)
Aethelin's site has some good information on the objects. Still not entirely sure how they work, but I get the basic idea.
Aeth is right about the first one. It was a sound locator used by AA Batteries to determine the direction the bombers were coming from.He is wrong about the second though. It is a large visual parallax rangefinder. It was used to determine the altitude of bombers caught in searchlights so that the fuses of AA shells could be set for the raid altitude. They had about 10 of these range finders of all different sizes from handheld ones to the monster pictured which was on a fixed mount. Such visual rangefinders were common until laser range-finding became practical in the 70's. We still had on in my mortar platoon in the late 80s that we used when registering our guns before field exercises.
