It was almost fifty years ago that a TRISAT non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) system began testing in a radar laboratory at the big Navy test center at Patuxent River, Maryland. Since I was on the design team, I ran contractor tests there. For all I know, some of the details of this system, given the label AN/ASX-2 by the Navy, are still secret, but this box has been sanitized by having its magnetic core memory wiped clean. That renders it unclassified. There is one of these on display at the Patuxent Naval Air Museum (you can google it) because I sent it there years ago. There were six of these, originally built for Phantom jets, and they all worked when the Navy put them on the shelf for "survey", meaning "junk it".I don't have power supplies for this any more - and they ran on 400 cycle power anyway. This will make a good doorstop. Taxpayers paid beaucoup for these boxes. If you're desperate to learn even more, you can see a picture of the full TRISAT system and read a history of Target ID by more Googling.The winning bidder will get the computer unit shown, including the 32K magnetic core memory but no circuit boards inside, plus a control/indicator that the fighter aircrew looked at if they wanted to know what they were going to shoot down. The NCTR program was deep in development until 1988, when things went bad; from the Washington POST:"NAVY F-14 DOWNS AIR FORCE JET DURING EXERCISE" Associated Press NORFOLK, Sept. 22, 1988:"Six months before the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger plane it mistook for a jet fighter, the Navy killed promising long-range research programs on new systems that could dramatically improve a crew's ability to identify hostile and civilian aircraft in combat, according to Navy officials. "The Navy, blaming the budget squeeze, scrapped its entire five-year research program - totaling more than $100 million - for developing 'noncooperative' methods of identifying aircraft that do not respond to warnings or properly identify themselves." The article continues, getting bogged down in budget numbers. The mistakes in the second paragraph alone are these: The program was not in "research", but in the Navy's test cycle called "DT" - development test, a couple of steps beyond research. The program had been in stretched-out development since 1965, not 1983. The total cost can't reliably be stated by the POST or anybody else. And a ship, if it had had NCTR, could identify substantially all airplanes, whether they responded or identified themselves or not