"Richard Casady" wrote

What is it about warning bouys that makes prople snuggle up to them.


I never heard of or observed such a tendency. This wasn't a buoy but a
large dock clearly intended to accomodate large supply vessels so there
wasn't any navigational concern with less than 5 feet of draft. 300 feet is
just the DOD's idea of security. If they were really serious about it, they
would put out those yellow buoys that are starting to appear in some places.
The towers go right up to the edge of a working harbor on the other side so
keeping people at a distance is kind of pointless.

--
Roger Long

"Roger Long" wrote in
:

I don't normally get excited by antennas but motoring up to this array
as the turn around point of our trip gave me the feeling you get when
you look at one of the biggest and most impressive of anything. 26
1000 foot tall towers all interconnected with the most fantastic web
of wires and bed spring like arrangements you can imagine. It
transmits at 25 Mhz to tell our nuke subs which cities to vaporize.
If there is a war, presumably a nuke will go off just above it within
one or two milliseconds of the ones that go off over Washington DC.
Strange to think that this wild and remote spot is Ground 0.1.

http://home.maine.rr.com/rlma/Cutler.jpg

We motored right up to the dock where the sign says, "Do not approach
within 300 feet." With typical government common sense, the type size
is such that the sign can't be read until you are within 100 feet. No
signs of security or any human presence except for a single van parked
next to the administration building. There is a building with about a
dozen very large diesel engine exhausts sticking out of the roof so I
imagine this sucker pumps out some real power.

There is something in the cruising guide about the transmissions from
this facility also being a prime means of measuring sunspot or solar
activity due to their effect on the ionosphere.

You can see the layout on Google Earth right at the end of our trip.
They don't bother to hide the towers on the chart, unlike the more
impressive structure that used to be in Prospect Harbor. In the
curious blank spot on the chart used to be a circle of towers about a
mile in diameter and nearly as tall as these. Around the top of the
towers ran a flat coil of huge diameter cable. The strands were maybe
a foot in diameter and the entire coil was wider than a highway. I
don't know when this was dismantled but I think it was still there
when I went through in the mid 80's. No sign of the remains or tower
foundations visible on Google Earth that I can see.


Yes, that's NSS. They are one of the major Navy comm centers and
certainly ground zero for several countries' missiles.

How's it feel to be irradiated by one of the most powerful VLF
transmitters on the planet?....(c

I've talked to NSS on HF from our ship in the Med using WW2 AM
transmitters back in the 1960s.

Our ship was GD.

Correction: The remains of the Prospect Harbor antenna are still visible on
Google Earth. I was looking in the wrong place. It's also a lot smaller
than it seemed when I was sitting in a Kayak, only about a quarter mile in
diameter. It was still pretty impressive.

--
Roger Long

"Roger Long" wrote in
:

Correction: The remains of the Prospect Harbor antenna are still
visible on Google Earth. I was looking in the wrong place. It's also
a lot smaller than it seemed when I was sitting in a Kayak, only about
a quarter mile in diameter. It was still pretty impressive.

--
Roger Long





While we're on the subject of low freq antenna arrays, here's the one that
sets your automatic clocks, WWVB, Ft Collins, Colorado on 60 Khz:

http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvb.htm

My last visit to the station was when I was in PMEL (Precision Measuring
Equipment Laboratory) school at Lowry AFB, CO, in 1966. We were on a tour
of the, then, National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) labs at Boulder when
one of the NBS guys found out I was a ham radio op. He invited me to come
to WWVL (20 Khz but discontinued in 1972) and WWVB on 60 Khz, still using
the same, but refurbished, antenna array, today.

It's a very interesting loaded antenna on a frequency where the wave is
5000 meters long!

Look around and you'll see the bit rate is 1 bit per second, requiring each
code to take 1 minute to send. That's why it takes hours for your new
radio clock to set itself. It has to wait until it hears the right code
train at 1bps.