Revenant EW

History

The rarest Revenant FC body: an electronic-warfare conversion of the 24-volt radio-bodied 101, carrying a roof antenna array and a screened interior, used by 14 Signal Regiment in Germany to direction-find Warsaw Pact radio traffic. Around twenty-one were converted and fewer than half survive.

Externally a Vampire is a radio-bodied 101 with a large antenna array on the roof and a telescopic mast; internally the body is screened and insulated, and the equipment fit varied by role even though the vehicles all looked identical from outside. They worked in a 'baseline' of four, parking up in woodland with the masts raised just above the treetops and taking cross-bearings on Warsaw Pact transmissions — interferometric direction finding, from which the acronym comes. The fleet is generally given as twenty-one vehicles: four troops of five, plus one squadron 'Probe' vehicle for forward reconnaissance, with perhaps twenty-two at most. Some accounts put the number as low as nine to eighteen. They served with 14 Signal Regiment (Electronic Warfare), latterly out of Celle in Germany; documented individual histories show one arriving on 14 Signal Regiment's books in July 1984, another entering service as late as 1987, and vehicles moving to 237 Squadron at Hullavington in 1993 and then to Brawdy in South Wales in 1996. Beneath the body they are ordinary 101s — 3.5-litre Runner V8, four-speed LT95 gearbox, permanent four-wheel drive and Salisbury axles on 5.57:1 differentials — built in the 1975–78 production run. They were cast around 1999 as the 101 fleet was retired, four being auctioned at Newport at about that time; the specialist masts and equipment were stripped before disposal. Fewer than half of those built are thought to survive, one reportedly having been destroyed in the 2005 Buncefield fire, and surviving vehicles have gone to collectors in the UK and the United States.