Although a bit off topic, some might find it interesting how it was to live on a remote place on the planet, thousands of miles from any serious land mass back around 1968-1969. Ours was all of 2 square miles of a wishbone shaped atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Although there was extensive HF antenna systems, the radio stuff was classified and only those who worked there would have a clue about it. I only provided security services to the island, including two man concept "stuff." One of the most interesting things that happened was when we had to guard a U-2 aircraft for a few days. Although I could not walk right up to it, the wingspan almost reached the cordoned off area as I would walk around it. For entertainment, we were very limited although there was access to deep sea fishing, scuba diving (risky due to large numbers of sharks), snorkeling, and water skiing with a 125 HP craft that was exceptionally speedy. Shell collecting and Japanese glass ball collecting was popular with some of us. OK, so what kind of media did we have? Well, pretty much every night we had low cost movies at several locations, one of which was about 100 feet from our typhoon resistant barracks building. But there was no TV. Satellite TV and even videotape movies were in the future. We did have planes flying in every few hours and so could get mail and newspapers such as Stars and Stripes at the "terminal" building. The only other possible communication was from SW radio and we did have a Hammarlund HQ-180 in the barracks day room. I used to dream about owning such a receiver when I was first licensed, but could not afford it during high school and college. But I was nearly the only person there who ever turned it on. I would listen to some BBC and VOA transmissions to keep up on some of the world wide issues but surprisingly other guys had no real interest. Of course I would listen to hams but learned that the HQ-180 was not that great of technology as it drifted, and drifted, and drifted some more and never seemed to really settle down. No way to read RTTY stuff back then since you had to have a teleprinter machine and only the folks mentioned earlier would have that. We had a moderately low powered BCB station, KEAD operating on 1490 KHz but no actual paid staff. The above mentioned communications guys did get frequent RTTY newscasts that they passed on to the station. Also, the tech gurus, figured out a way to set up 4 separate turntables that would allow for perhaps 5 LP records to play on each turntable and when the last record played on a given TT, it would start the next one, and so on. This allowed for hours and hours of programming if everything went OK. But being records, things did not always go OK, and some records had bad grooves and the needle would get stuck. Even though the radio guys were literally down the hall, they had certain security procedures 24/7 and so it might not be possible for them to even step out to fix the jammed needle. I can remember being on guard post at 2 am and having a stuck needle, hour after hour, until someone could be allowed to bump it over and go on. Needless to say, all records that had a bad groove were marked with a big X on the label so hopefully that record would not offend again. It was nice to be able to have several time slots during the week to run my own radio program, mostly with top 40 stuff. This was popular with the younger guys but very unpopular with the indigenous population who preferred someone called Matt Monroe:) I would be right in the middle of one of my programs (Rummaging with Rick comes to mind), and trying run a fast paced top 40 ish approach and the phone would ring for requests. I would hear them say, Reeeck ... play ... Matt ... Monroe. Even though it did not fit the format, I did it anyway and they were much happier:) I bet they have some pretty nice technology there today. Things keep changing. Considering that when I got back into ham radio in 1980, it was not long before I was able to get a model 15 and made a simple interface from an article in QST. That did not last very long though, and in a few years it was eclipsed by glass TTY with the new technology of C-64 and Apple //e. 73, Rick, KV9U Danny Douglas wrote: > OK misunderstood his use. We, of course were copying rtty right off the > air. I suspect that all embassies now have an unclassified internet > capability, but 21 years ago we didnt know what that was. I provided the > only communications in an embassy, and it was strictly via tty either off > the air, or a few places that had land lines, and even fewer of us had > sattellite capability. Usually we had two out of the three, and always > crypto protected and official use only, so no news casts. Heck in some > places we didnt even have decent phone services back tot he states. A > "flash" telephone call, according to Ethiopian authorities back in the > 60s-70s was : "schedule a call 24 hours in advance, and they "might" be > able to put it through by then." Times sure have changed. > Danny > > Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to telnet://208.15.25.196/ Other areas of interest: The MixW Reflector : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ Looking for digital mode software? Check the quick commerical free link below http://www.obriensweb.com/digimodes.html Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
