Back in 2006 a pretty good online discussion got started on an old Yahoo discussion group dedicated to USAF Radar Site Veterans. Yahoo later shut down their discussion group service but I managed to save several stories from members that I think deserve to be preserved. I'll delete email addresses, which may no longer be valid anyway, and I made some minor edits to clean up typos or clarify details. Otherwise these stories and my replies to some of them are as they were written. I hope to add some other stories as well as I find them.
Enjoy!
Re: Winston Salem AFS Website
Posted by: "George"
Tue Nov 7, 2006 9:57 am (PST)
Winston-Salem, NC, was my first assignment out of tech school. I arrived around October or November 1964 and left for Sparrevohn Air Force Station (located 356 miles (573 km) southwest of Fairbanks, Alaska) around May 1968. Didn't hang around the 810th much as soon as I got a car. Moved off base about a year after getting there so the only time I was on base was when I was working. Worked rotating shifts at the FPS-26 height finder radar tower.
Alex Cheek mentioned finding a parachute in the old FPS-24 tower a few years ago. We used to have a jump club; we used old World War II parachutes with panels cut out for steering. When the guy heading it up got reassigned it sort of just folded.
Some tech reps from GE came to the site to do some mods to the 24, one night horsing around, they put the transmitter in power add (or something, we had power add in the 26, close to double the TX power). Anyway, every time the antenna swung around it lit up the top floors of a building they were putting up in downtown Winston-Salem. It sure scared the locals, thought the Martians had arrived. I think it was the Wachovia bank building they were putting up.
Another guy, Leo Schuller, arrived in 1965; he was a little older as he was trying to dodge the draft. He was an auto mechanic and drag racer. He got us a job downtown as mechanics at an electrical contracting company. I couldn't even spell mechanic then, today I still work on my cars and trucks. Put in 20 to 80 hours a week at that "part time" job, and did drag racing on the weekends. He
married a local girl, got out of the service and still lives in or near Winston-Salem.
I remember one of the best things I liked was midnight chow; sometimes the cook would let us cook our own food. I think we paid a quarter for it.
Someone mentioned the 26 as having a hydraulically driven antenna, true; it was something like 3000 psi. Leo, being the mechanic he was, got the bright idea of rebuilding the hydraulics because it leaked. So, we did. Used to like taking the antenna out of ops control, rotating it 180 degrees and putting it back into ops control. The antenna would whip around
about 10,000 mile per hour and come to a sudden stop. In spite of the fact that the antenna was mounted on its own supports in the middle of the building, the whole building would shake. Yeah, we were pretty stupid back then (so what's changed).
George Holmes
----
George:
You got the building right. At that time the Wachovia Bank building was the tallest building in the South East (or so the locals liked to claim), and the 810th had a few interesting effects on it. I was told that when the FPS-26 pointed towards downtown at night you could see the lights flashing from floor to floor as the antenna rocked. I recall one day the Governor of North Carolina came to town to give some sort of speech. Unfortunately, they decided to do it on one of the upper floors of the Wachovia bank building. The story in the paper the next morning mentioned that the Governor's speech was marred by mysterious buzzing noises coming over the PA system.
Occasionally I would go into the plumbing shop on the base and all the pipe fittings would be buzzing in the bins. Local churches often complained that their electric organs would buzz during Sunday services. I was a bit of an audiophile back then and had a simple stereo system with a Sony open reel tape deck. I liked making mix tapes, and they all had buzzing in them. We would carry all the gear across the street and down to the water wells to get as far as we could from the transmitters. We would set up the tape decks on the floor and record. It helped some, but did not completely solve the problem.
The GATR site had a faraday cage - a room covered in copper screen that would block radio signals. One day on a lark I took a portable radio tuned to a powerful local station up there. Of course, the music from the radio was mixed with radar buzzing. I carried the radio into the faraday cage and closed the door. The local station went totally silent, but the buzzing continued with no change.
Occasionally they would send someone out to add filters to people’s equipment to stop these problems, though I'm not sure how much it helped. All that RF was the one thing I didn't like about being stationed there.
John Kessler
Re: really entertaining messages
Posted by: "Frank and Therese Marsh"
Tue Nov 7, 2006 2:04 pm (PST)
This is in reply to the thought that "radar waves make you sterile". When I was on the mountain top near K18 in Korea our living quarters (Called a Jamesway) was perhaps 30 to 40 yards from the TPS-1D radar. We kept our mess gear hung along a top railing above our beds. Every antenna revolution you would hear a sound (ZIPPPP) from those hanging eating utensils. I do have two healthy children.
Then again, we used to hold florescent light lamps in the area of radar antennas, and watch them light up. I do think that was dumb to do. I once screwed up a watch working near a magnetron that I fixed by dangling it on a string in front of the feed horn. I don't think that that was too smart either.
On the smart side, I would never work on equipment alone. If another 30352 radar tech was not available, I would have a radar operator with me. Later on, when I went to work for the FAA, I thought it was bad procedure to expect technicians to work on dangerous equipment alone. And trying to tune the transmitter on the FPS-35 at Montauk (working with the FAA, but not alone) was straight out of a horror movie. You had to lay on your back far enough away so that you could barely reach the adjustment controls, and in such a forced reach you were unlikely to reach six inches too far and make contact with extremely high voltage, and get killed. That high powered, lower frequency radar was just a bit short of pushing the tide out. Well, maybe not.
Frank
Re: really entertaining messages
Posted by: "John Kessler"
Tue Nov 7, 2006 3:58 pm (PST)
From: Al Miller
> A Second Lieutenant right out of ROTC told me Radar waves make you sterile" and he was dead serious. never forgot that one.
I know of one case where that may have been true.
Often the high winds accompanying the many thunderstorms that passed through the Winston-Salem area during the summer months would trip the motors driving the antenna on the 810th's AN/FPS-24. This required a trip to the roof to reset the breakers. That meant climbing a ladder, opening a trap door and climbing out to the roof. The trap door was equipped with an interlock switch. When the door opened the transmitters were supposed to shut down. I don't know what the normal procedures were supposed to be, but it appears that the guys relied on this to kill the RF when they went outside. Sounds like a really bad idea to me, but shortcuts happen.
One night this happened and the tech went up, reset the motors, and headed back down. At that point he noticed a warning light on indicating the transmitters were still alive. As I heard the story, he swore a lot and spent the next few days nursing a very bad "sunburn".
I always wondered if he ever had any children, or how long he lived after that. It couldn't have been a very healthy thing.
I was told by one of the techs that if you hung a cow in front of the feed horn, it would be well done in a few seconds. We never tested that idea, though it would have made for a really cool microwave oven.
John Kessler
Posted by: "Jeff Lane"
Tue Nov 7, 2006 6:54 pm (PST)
It really zapped an apple in hurry.
Jeff Lane
640th & 641st
Re: really entertaining messages
Posted by: "Warren Hester"
Wed Nov 8, 2006 12:51 pm (PST)
In 1957, while working on the FPS-3 at the 795th at Cape Romanzof AK, we had a tech who had three or four flash cubes in his fatigue jacket that went off and burned right through the pocket and scared him half to death. We thought he was having a heart attack. We were just finishing the daily routine of changing the tr and atr tubes and switched on the power.
A1C Retired Warren Hester
War Games at Winston Salem
Posted by: "Jim Ashurst"
Thu Nov 9, 2006 7:28 am (PST)
In 68' we had one of those readiness exercises where the B-52's go out and try to jam the radars and our operators would try to read through it, meanwhile the rest of us had to sit in the blockhouse all day and pretend a momentous war was on. I couldn't stand the thought of sitting all day so I volunteered for guard duty. They planted some "bombs" in the morning before the exercise began so we could practice looking for any suspicious packages, suspicious being like a paper sack with the word BOMB written on it. Wouldn't it be nice of Al Qaeda would label their bombs that way?
Our Executive officer was, and this is only my opinion and I could be wrong, but I thought he was a dimwit. When we reported for guard duty, the Lt. issued us each a clip of live ammo. What the hell he was thinking I never figured out. Later it turned out he'd loaded his .45 and had it in his desk drawer, waiting for the wily japs to walk in, I guess.
So, we were walking the perimeter and some of these young kids on guard duty had hardly ever held a gun before except in basic, so I'd see them sighting down their rifles at me or whoever, playing around. I got a bit nervous wondering just where their clip of live ammo was. They were M2 Carbines and we couldn't even agree which way the lever went for full auto. We weren't very fearsome warriors but we would have been very capable of shooting each other by accident.
Later I was guarding the gate into the secure area. Here comes a clerk typist kid from the orderly room carrying one of these packages labelled "BOMB" up to the gate and asked to come in. I asked him what he had there. He says "A bomb". So, I told him he was under arrest and just stand there while I got the power production guy to call the Air Police, since I didn't have a phone. While I had walked over to the power production building the kid tossed his "BOMB" up on top of the
guard shack. I came back and called him names and things so he jumped up and knocked it back down on the ground just as the APs came running up.
I imagine these APs are quite frustrated because they have been to Air Police school and they have learned the “coply arts” but then they are at this boring radar base with nothing much to do. So here they had them a real live genuine suspect, even though we all knew each other and this was just a kid from the orderly room. One of them "defused" the bomb, meaning he stomped on the sack, and they racked that kid up mercilessly. They had him spread eagled and hog tied and whatever. They took him off to the block house and I don't know what went on from there. Anyway, turned out the Lt had told him to go plant another bomb so he was just doing what he was told.
And that's what it took to keep America free.
War Games at Winston Salem
Posted by: "John Kessler"
Fri Nov 10, 2006 3:48 pm (PST)
From "Jim Ashurst"
> And that's what it took to keep America free.
I remember those goofy drills! The siren would go off in the middle of the night and we would all have to get out of bed, get dressed, and wander over to the Air Police office. A few folks failed to wake up so someone would go through the barracks pounding on the doors. At least once someone intentionally failed to get up and ended up in some hot water.
They would hand us all unloaded M1s (or were they M2s? I would have no idea.) and I would go guard the sewage treatment plant or some such silliness - defending the 810th from the hoards of marauding tobacco farmers. As you assumed, I had never fired a rifle except for the one day of training in basic, where I got to fire an M16, so I had no idea what I was doing. They were wise to hand them out sans ammo.
I recall one drill where I ended up in the Ops building looking for a "bomb", and I ended up being the "hero" for finding it. It helped that I worked in maintenance because I knew my way around inside the building better than most folks. As I recall, the reward was that we all got to go back to bed.
There was one Air Policeman at the 810th (who shall go unnamed) who I heard got into some trouble for shooting birds while pulling night duty in the main entrance guard shack. I guess that job had to be mighty boring.
Speaking of getting in trouble, one of the guys working the late shift in the communications center was once caught sleeping on duty. They ended up court marshaling him. Since we didn't have facilities to deal with that at the 810th, he was sent to Seymour Johnson AFB for a hearing. He was convicted and given a modest fine as punishment. However, he received TDY pay for the time he spent at Seymour Johnson so he ended up making a modest profit from it!
It's no wonder that I was a big M.A.S.H. fan when that movie and TV show ran. While I was at the 810th however we referred to ourselves as F-Troop.
John Kessler
War Games at Winston Salem
Posted by: "Bob Becker"
Mon Nov 13, 2006 3:48 pm (PST)
I was stationed at Winston-Salem from 57 to 59. One day the base got a call from some officers whose vehicle had broken down while transporting some classified documents. The base sent a vehicle to pick them up, stored their documents and bags in Radar Ops., and took them to the club. Shortly afterwards one of the officers looked at his watch and said "your Ops. building has just blown up." Needless to say, there were some very embarrassed security folks.
Bob "Hobo" Becker