From: an old friend on Jul 24, 11:30 am

wrote:
From: "Jim Hampton" on Sat 23 Jul 2005 23:04


Where do you find this mythical freebander running TWENTY FIVE
KILOWATTS?!? [only in newsgroups is where...]

I'd love to see such a station just for the experence I can hardly
imagine it

You can see pictures of how it used to be at:

http://kauko.hallikainen.org/history/equipment/

Go to the sub-heading "Stations" and click on "ADA." It's about
an Army station in the 1950s whose transmitter site at over
three dozen HF transmitters ranging from 1 KW to 40 KW output.
Station ADA was only the third largest in the worldwide Army
network at the time. I was there for three years and most of
the pictures are from my own camera. All vacuum tubes, of
course, this was in the 1950s.

The other document under "Stations" is from a brochure done
up by the same battalion I served in, but ten years later.
All Signal Corps photographs.

Control was transferred from Army to USAF in 1963 and the USAF
terminated the station in 1978. HF was becoming less and less
used by the U.S. military in the 1980s. Civilian use of HF
was downsizing and the AFRS-AFRTS worldwide broadcasting went
to comm satellite relay. Even VOA downsized in that time and
most of those HUGE cabinets of power went to the scrap heap.

Some of the old stand-bys are still there, such as WWV. For
a look at the transmitters of WWV, WWVH, and (for 60 KHz)
WWVB, go to http://www.nist.gov and click the "Time and
Frequency" heading. WWVB puts out 50 KW and keeps thousands
of clocks and wris****ches on time every night...automatically.

bit bit