In article , Dick Carroll
writes:

Larry Roll K3LT wrote:

In article ,

(Len Over 21) writes:

A half century ago I felt right at home working primary communications
on Army radio station ADA. Not only feeling that but BEING AT HOME
at the new site of Camp Tomlinson...barracks at one corner of the huge
antenna field. ADA never used "CW" (on-off keying), trans-Pacific or
local.

DICK, you've NEVER done that in the US Army, have you?

All you can do is demand that EVERYONE HAD TO DO IT LIKE YOU
DID but you can never offer any viable proof why they should.

LHA

Lennie:

Your half-century old experiences in military communications, where, by
your own admission, you never utilized the Morse/CW mode, are irrelevant
to the discussion of Morse code testing requirements within the AMATEUR
Radio Service in 2003. In fact, as a person who does not use the Morse
code for any reason whatsoever, you are self-disqualified from rendering
any judgment on the topic whatsoever. Therefore, I suggest that you
stop wasting your time, find something you know something about (which
from my personal observation seems to be limited to megalomaniacal,
ego-driven character assassination) and talk about that, instead. You
are not influencing anyone on the topic of code testing.

73 de Larry, K3LT

Well, Well...Lennie is still touting his BC610 babysitting experience as
being (= / ) ham radio, hmm??

While he was sitting around twiddling his
thumbs and waiting for a breaker to trip so he'd have something to do, I was
busily involved in operating AND REPAIRING one of the very first video tape
systems in the country, among many other very interesting work activities at
the Signal School at Fort Monmouth.

Ooooo! Spent your whole tour of Army duty at Monmouth, did you?

You had fun splicing mag tape? :-)

That's STUDIO BROADCASTING duties, NOT communications.

You see, instead of sending me to an obscure, remote MINOR outpost about as
far
away as it's possible to be sent, when I finished electronics training, the
Signal School kept me there as permanent party, to work as a broadcast
engineer at the educational TV station ran by the school.

My Signal School training was 7 months total at Fort Monmouth in 1952 for
microwave radio relay MOS. We didn't DICK around with AFRS things,
but spent all the Monmouth time in learning to operate and maintain radio
relay equipment for communications.

The primary communications facility for an Area Command is hardly "minor,"
numbbrain. Took half a battalion to handle the quarter-million messages
per month relayed through ADA in the mid-1950s.

ADA was the callsign of the Far East Command Headquarters in Tokyo.

ADA is still the callsign and now belongs to USARPAC, the United States
Army Pacific, based at Fort Shafter, Hawaii.

A most interesting
and challenging assignment, indeed. I would have been completely happy to have
stayed there for the remainder of my term of service, but my name came up for
an
overseas tour of duty rotation, so off to Europe I went after a year and a
half.

And what did you do in Yurp, old-timer? Fix more mag tape units for
AFRS Special Services' broadcasting?

I sure do feel for poor ol' Lennie, tho, he must have had a rough go of it
'way
out there in the JA boondocks with nothing to do but listen to the
transformers
hum and wait for another overload. And I hear those BC610's didn't overload
all
that often, either. Tsk, tsk.

ADA didn't have "BC-610s," ignorant one. BC-339 1 KW oldies, BC-340 10 KW
oldies, Press Wireless PW-15s, Western Electric LD-T2 4 KW PEP SSBs,
AN/FRC-22 40 KW (Linear mode) used as amplifiers for the LD-T2, a Collins
Autotune 1 KW model, a Wilcox Electric 1 KW AM transmitter. Frequency
synthesizers had yet to develop so all FSK transmitters used O-5 exciters
requiring direct crystal control. ADA had about 3 dozen O-5s on racks
behind the central control console and QSYs required changing quartz
crystals kept in a heated cabinet. Each shift in a 24 hour period averaged
about 11 QSYs each. Every QSY had frequency checked prior to resumption
of traffic by a General Radio Frequency Meter at the receiver site at Camp
Owada (roughly 30 miles away), reporting Mark and Space frequencies to
the order-wire TTY loop linking transmitters, control at Chuo Kogyo, and
receiver frequency standards. The average QSY was 2 minutes from QSY
order issued by control until frequency standards reported (on TTY) that
frequencies were within limits. SSB transmitters were servo-tuned to 10
preset frequencies and a QSY on those took 30 seconds; frequency
standards would double-check the pilot carrier frequency but those never
varied. All of the O-5s required separate manual setting of Mark and
Space; a Fox Test mechanical TTY player was used for Mark/Space
setting (control had 3 at their disposal for that).

BC-610s were in the AN/GRC-26 vans, self-contained stations fitted with TTYs
and exciters for FSK RTTY. My battalion was a caretaker for a half-dozen of
those to be used for emergency communications netting. For emergency
linking on landline cable going out, ADA transmitters had 7 AN/TRC-8 and 6
AN/TRC-1 UHF-VHF radio relay terminals at the old site on Tsukishima. At
the new transmitter site ADA had four 24-voice-channel GE microwave
radio relay terminals (two running, two as hot spares) at 1.8 GHz band
center, full duplex, 10 foot diameter Andrew parabolic reflector antennas on
a 200 foot tower, pressurized 1 5/8" solid coaxial feed.

The billet for C Company (transmitters), 8235th Army Unit, Army Central
Command Japan, was at Hardy Barracks in Tokyo's Roppongi district.
Tokyo, a major metropolitan area, is hardly in the "backwoods" of anyplace.
Hardy Barracks still exists as a US facility today despite almost total
pull-out of US installations since the 1950s...a two-page article on Hardy
Barracks of the 1950s was done in the Pacific Stars & Stripes last year
in November, staffer Rick Chernitzer interviewing me for the entire article
(photos used were mine also). Hardy Barracks is less than a mile from
the Diet (Japanese Congress).

In 1955 ADA handled about 220 thousand TTY messages a month to/from
Army units, plus additional circuits for USAF and USN. Two Facsimile
terminals were at the control center. Control's TTY "room" was the entire
second story of a converted warehouse holding over 200 various TTY
terminals, most being rack-sized units having both transmitting distributor
and receiving punch (all tapes were punched chadless to allow over-
printing to read the address preambles). Control at Chuo Kogyo (the name
of the former Tokyo civilian company) originated very few messages,
serving to relay all traffic by the "torn tape" method with operators
reading
the address preambles and hand-carrying tapes to the proper destination.

Radio circuits were to Saigon (then in "French Indochina"), Manila,
Okinawa, Pusan (Korea), Seoul (Korea), Anchorage, Seattle, Hawaii,
San Francisco on a 24/7 basis with other radio circuits as needed such
as the Far East Commander's aircraft. Okinawa, Seattle, Hawaii, and
San Francisco had SSB in addition to FSK RTTY. Each SSB circuit
had two voice channels plus about 8 TTY channels with duplicated Mark
Space tones to avoid selective fading effects.

The receiver site at Camp Owada was truly "out in the boondocks" and
shared between Army and USAF. It was a radio-quiet environment and
the antenna field was considered the largest in the world in the mid-
1950s. "Receivers" had antenna multicouplers to allow space-diversity
auto-switching between a pair of widely-separated rhombics. With tone
pairing on SSB to overcome selective fading effects, the combined space
and frequency diversity allowed an excellent low error rate at receivers.

USAF was given responsibility for operating the Army HF primary
communications in 1962 and they continued until the Central Honshu HF
comm facility was disbanded in 1978. That included the 9 microwave
terminals I was responsible for at Chuo Kogyo control as supervisor.

HF communications capability still exists in Japan at Camp Zama (near
Yokohama), maintained as a secondary comm means by the 78th
Signal Battalion under the command of the 516th Signal Brigade at
Fort Shafter. US military primary communications is now handled by
the DSN (Digital Switched Network) using fiber-optic cable and satellite
relay. The DSN offers both telephony and Internet-like computer-modem
communications with the added capability of being encrypted.

What a chutz-putz!

Too bad you didn't get into the Big Leagues of REAL communications,
old-timer. You wouldn't have to snarl and hurl epithets as an amateur
after fussing around with AFRS toys.

Leonard H. Anderson
ex-RA16408336, US Army Signal Corps