Incorrect. Each pod carries an exciter and two jammers. Surveillance receivers are mounted elsewhere; mostly in the football.
You are correct. It has been 25 years since I was in and the terminology has left me. They were called universal exciters and I remembers seeing a LOT of digital cards inside them. The exciter tech had a really easy job. Basically he connected it to the computer and let the computer run the check. He then took out the bad card and sent it back to the manufacturer for repair, unlike the techs who repaired the older exciters who had to troubleshoot and repair them down to the component level.
I’ll bet that the universal exciters we had then are so obsolete that they have replaced them with ones with ten times the capability and 1/10 the number of components.
I remember doing inspection and pulling the panels off the football and pulling the receivers out.
P.S. The test data was loaded on a 12” removable hard disk! I think it held a couple of megabytes of data.