Spycraft - Melton [130]
A dramatic breakthrough in audio hardware occurred in the 1970s. The SRT family of transmitters, which was steadily improving, made an impressive leap forward with the “Century Series” that carried three number designators. Nothing like it had previously existed in the OTS arsenal of covert audio equipment. Known particularly for the tiny size as well as performance, the Century Series devices were microphones and transmitters made with integrated circuits jammed into packages of less than a cubic inch of space. OTS called it fractional cubic inch technology.
“To achieve the fractional cubic inch volumetric size, the whole package contained integrated circuits, very special integrated circuits,” said Kurt Beck, who worked on the project. “Our contractors used custom technology and processes. There wasn’t anything like it on the commercial market. It was a team effort. It was the contractor and the ops guys both asking, How do you get this stuff to be this small? How do you engineer the device into the size of this package?”
The volume of the new audio packages was comparable to that of six U.S. quarters stacked one on top of another. The housing around the bug’s hermetically sealed components had slots on the side that allowed techs to plug in an external power source, antenna, and microphone as needed. In less than twenty years, OTS had gone from an unreliable vacuum tube SRT-1 to a stable but power hungry SRT-3 to a family of transmitters whose reliability, size, and functionality could be adapted to virtually any covert audio requirement.
“This was not your incremental, tiny improvement—this was a quantum step,” said Linn, who built power cells for the Century Series transmitters. In terms of reliability and sophistication, it was the difference between a 1970s citizens band radio and a twenty-first-century cell phone. The James Bond gadgetry imagined in Q’s fictional laboratory had arrived in Langley. Fractional cubic inch technology brought not only the ability to build audio into smaller concealments, but also a major reduction in power required to transmit. It allowed for simultaneous transmission from two or more microphones positioned within three feet of each other. Essentially working like human ears, the listening post could “steer” audio, filtering out background noise in the room to focus in on conversations that were of particular interest.24
“It wasn’t just the electronics, but the power consumption. The power consumption was always the problem that would knock you in the head,” explained Kurt. “So if we could achieve an order-of-magnitude reduction in the power consumption, we could make a corresponding reduction in the size of the battery. That to me is the breakthrough. The low-power technology. Every 10 percent savings in power drain translated into a big lifetime improvement for the size of the battery. It didn’t make much difference if you halved the size of the transmitter, from a half a cubic inch to a fractional cubic inch, if the battery pack had to stay at ten cubic inches.”
When OTS first envisioned the fractional cubic inch package, integrated circuits were in their infancy. A little more than a decade earlier, in 1958, Jack Kilby, working at Texas Instruments, and Robert Noyce, at Fairchild Semiconductor, independently came up with the idea of the integrated circuit. Kilby beat Noyce to the patent by less than a year and later won the Nobel Prize, but Noyce, who later cofounded Intel, came up with several technical solutions, such as how to connect the tiny components on the chip, which made production practical.
“We talked to these designers and the engineers and we found out there were a lot of trade-offs you could make in all this stuff,” Kurt explained. “When we started to push on them to get the power down, ideas began to crop up. The problem was getting these analog circuits to be efficient with the power supplied. Instead of having two percent efficiency, could we get twenty-five percent efficiency?25 It