"Mike Andrews" wrote on Tue, 8 May 2007 11:11:15
EDT:

On Tue, 8 May 2007 03:15:51 EDT, BNB Sound wrote

I've been an amateur operator for a little over a year now and one of
my favorite parts of the hobby is soaking up stories from previous
decades. One of the things I'm curious about is professional HF work.
I've heard it mentioned in passing that when the early trans-Atlantic
cables went down they would shift to HF circuits as available to try
and pick up the slack.
So, what else is out there. I know the military has always been
heavily invested in radio gear, but what else was (and is?) there? I'd
love to hear from anyone who ever brought home a paycheck for working
the airwaves.

When I was stationed at Camp Drake, Japan, some time after Len left,
we were still using HF circuits to ship data (60 Baud TTY, 2400 Baud
"high speed data", and other stuff slower than 2400 Baud) to various
places around the world. I was there 2 years, starting in Jan '68. The
TX and RX sites were in Kashiwa and Owada, though I can't remember
which was which.

Kashiwa was the transmitter site built on an old WWII airfield with
about two square miles of mostly wire antennas (lots of rhombics),
NE of Tokyo. Owada (for Camp Owada) originally was a shared
USA-USAF receiver site with maybe twice the antenna field size
scattered over numerous small farms NNW of Tokyo. Army built
most of it and control was transferred to USAF in 1963. In 1978
nearly everything was given back to the Japanese government.
Parts of "Owada" receiving site was still active a decade later but
under control of the US Intelligence Agencies as an intercept site.
[no public info on such work :-) ]

We also used HF circuits at Osan AB, ROK, and some other places where
I was stationed. Never a hint of Morse, though; it was all TTY and
synchronous data.

True. Even during WWII the teleprinter was the majority
communications medium for the military, regardless of the stories
that have circulated on morse code use from that War. The center
for Army worldwide communications was Fort Detrick, MD, or radio
callsign WAR (Washington Army Radio). :-) There were separate
transmitter (Woodbridge, VA) and receiver (La Plata, MD) sites with
the control center at Ft. Detrick being primarily a TTY tape relay
unit feeding the Pentagon and 70-odd TTY trunk circuits to major
communications centers worldwide. Tape relay folks used the
network identifier rather than radio callsign. WAR had "RUEP" at
Fort Detrick while Far East Command HQ in Tokyo had "RUAP."
[TTY node IDs always began with "R" but I never found out why...]

TTY was much preferred for several reasons: It was fast, 60 or
100 words per minute with electromechanical terminals; it would
have a printed record at both Tx and Rx relay nodes; it could be
on punched paper tape with printing, ideal for human relaying to
other terminals; it could be encrypted-decrypted on-line or off-line,
vital during hostile times such as the Cold War. Note: The USA
rolling-key encryption system used from WWII until the capture
of the USS Pueblo was never known to have been broken by any
foreign intelligence service. TTYs never needed bathroom breaks,
were "fed" only when paper and ribbons reached their end, and
could work 24 hours a day. The USA, USN, and USAF operated
their parts of the Defense Communications System 24/7...and
there were trade-offs between all branches on the HF circuits,
each branch helping the other out of local problem situations.

Between the end of WWII and towards the beginning of the
1980s the worldwide military radio communications networks
were immense, larger than the combined resources of all USA
civilian radio communications networks. The Army's networks
in Europe, primarily Germany, are illustrated on the excellent
historical site (1945 to 1989) www.usarmygermany.com by
Walter Elkins. In the Far East of 1962 the Signal Corps had

http://sujan.hallikainen.org/Broadca...phabetSoup.pdf

By 1970 the US military had a better overall organization and
new kinds of equipment. Troposcatter (on low microwaves) was
replacing short-haul (under 400 miles) HF radio circuits. LOS
microwave links were replacing more and more land wire circuits.
AUTOVON (automatic voice) and AUTODIN (automatic digital)
circuits came into being, integrated with civilian communications
infrastructure. By 1980 the military satellites were beginning to
take over the really long-haul HF circuits, offering huge bandwidth
capability and thus very fast throughput. Add to that the buried
and underwater fiber-optic cables of civilian companies leasing
space to the government and military, available throughputs into
the GigaBit region. HF radio was relegated to a standby/back-up
role where it remains to this day. Radiation-hardened comm sats
are the medium of choice for the US military now.

The Defense Switched Network (DSN) was formed out of the old
AUTOVON and AUTODIN with the Internet protocols and became
the "government's own Internet" with the added capability of very
robust encryption and the ability to tie in directly with the existing
communications infrastructure or be used directly with comm sats.
That eliminated the old HF torn-tape message system and
subsequent delays of manual relaying of p-tape. In addition, all
DSN nodes can be alerted with "Flash" priority warnings or
messages, all at the same time, something not possible with the
older HF relay system.

You do know about the Coastie CW op's pages at
http://www.radiomarine.org/tales.html? These are gripping, and in
one case I found them hair-raising.

I, too, would love to hear from non-military, non-amateur HF users.

One could go to the more affluent private boat owners who do
deep-water sailing. They use HF SSB away from harbors. Not
much radio-related "hair raising" stuff there, except maybe
what is shown on "CSI: Miami." :-)

The first chapter of the "Collins Sideband Book" by Pappenfus,
Bruene, and Schoenike shows an AT&T SSB map with direct
and switched links to worldwide locations, circa 1960. I count
about 122 stations on that map worldwide. Considering that each
commercial SSB circuit of the time could carry two voice and
eight TTY channels simultaneously, that's fairly large. On the
other hand the service was 24/7 and rather routine, not much
emotion-raising (except to the users of such services).

HF use today, other than amateur, CB, and government, is
relegated to maritime radio on deep water routes (SSB voice
and data), air carrier long-route-over-water communications
(SSB voice), BC (AM and digital voice-music), some comms
services that haven't upgraded to sats or fiber-optics, and
RF ID stations in stores. It's a changed radio world
compared to a half century ago.

73, Len AF6AY