Squirt, I believe, refers to a form of "burst" transmission, in the sense of time-compressed transmission, whereby a great deal of information is transmitted in a very short time frame, necessitating decompression for play back. The reference below demonstrates this point. It cites how German U-boats used "squirt" transmitters in order to evade direction finders during WW2. That's the only reference I've been able to come up with for this specific term in the context of the Nimrod passage.
It's not a new principle, by any means, and it's a technique that is commonly employed for a variety of applications, including the acceleration of transmission times for MPEG and other multimedia content over satellite and wireline facilities. In such a way a three hour movie might be transmitted in only a few minutes, if the size of a channel (i.e., its throughput carrying capability) permitted.
I suspect this is the case in the reference you cited: cramming as much information into as short a burst time as possible, even if its a compressed volume of voice. Although, the actual term, "squirt radio," is not a common one from my experience.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have squirt radio transmitters like the German U-boats,” Peterson added. They can transmit a message so fast our direction-finding stations aren’t even sure they heard any-thing. If something goes wrong and we don’t hear from you we could possibly put a photo-recon plane in the air to see if we can locate you. We’ve had excellent results from LeMay’s photo intelligence flights.
They can spot ships aground or sunk in shallow water. But that would be a last resort.”
rollingthunderbooks.com
If anyone has a better account, please post. In the meantime, I'm late for my visit to the chiropractor :(
FAC
ps - I just noticed that there are a lot more entries under "squirt transmission," but my L3 won't wait. |
