Old Chief Lynn




Back before Hurricane Hugo blew it all away, the USCG's old 1.9Mhz Loran
"A" station on the North end of Folly Beach still had its original 1/4
wave tower on the beach, the building was there but the equipment was
gone. It took me about 8 levels of CG bureaucrats, but I finally got
permission to go over to the station, with the key, and operate ham radio
from this fine example of a 160 meter vertical antenna on the Atlantic
Oceanfront for a weekend. We took a bunch of dedicated crew and operated
all weekend, logging hundreds of 160M DX from Europe, Africa, Middle
East, Japan....stations I didn't think possible on such a low frequency
band running so little power as we were limited to.


The old antenna served us well but we never got to go back because Hugo
came and blew the top of the antenna away. The stub that's left on its
solid old mount is a weather station for NOAA, now:

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/images/Stations/fbis1.jpg

Under that base is about 36 radials under those salt-water dunes, the
perfect ground plane. It was a great weekend of hammin'...(c;

73 DE W4CSC