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#1
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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. Jon KC2PNF |
#2
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On May 8, 7:15 am, BNB Sound wrote:
So, what else is out there. Commercial shipping and aviation, press (AP, UPI, Reuters, etc.), weather stations, outback schools in Austrailia and Canada, shortwave broadcasters, rural telephone systems (an HF radio link existed into a South Dakota Indian reservation into the 1970's), government communications in large countries such as China and Russia, public marine telephone, and more. Pick up a copy of a "SWL Directory" and you'll be amazed! 73, RDW |
#3
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On Tue, 8 May 2007 03:15:51 EDT, BNB Sound wrote in .com:
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. 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. 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. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO Tired old sysadmin |
#4
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"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 |
#5
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On May 9, 11:07 am, AF6AY wrote:
"Mike Andrews" wrote on Tue, 8 May 2007 11:11:15 EDT: On Tue, 8 May 2007 03:15:51 EDT, BNB Sound wrote 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). does much if any of this survive to your knowledge? |
#6
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On May 9, 9:02 am, an old freind wrote:
On May 9, 11:07 am, AF6AY wrote: "Mike Andrews" wrote on Tue, 8 May 2007 11:11:15 EDT: On Tue, 8 May 2007 03:15:51 EDT, BNB Sound wrote 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). does much if any of this survive to your knowledge? Not a great deal of it is publicized so it is hard to say. Most of the government and military HF stations have changed from massive terminals to much smaller ones for specific agencies. Those can be seen in websites carrying SHARES information. The government conversion to ALE techniques has changed the nature of stations' operations and reduced the need for large stations with fixed wire antennas. The commercial communications world has gone over to (largely) fiber-optic, extremely broadband carriers for thousands of voice circuits, hundreds of data circuits, and dozens of video-audio circuits on one routing...plus the communications satellite transponder relay services. Note: at present - and for several years - all the available slots in the geosynchronous orbit have been filled by commsats. Note: Much of the underwater cable service has been or will be soon replaced by "pumped" (self-amplifying) fiber- optic cable. Communications such as ARINC stations for relaying HF from air carriers on long routes still exist in the same number. So do the private-boat, commercial boat HF relay services. The availability of HF communications for small stations in commercial work has caused a shift from reliance on the bigger mass-communications carriers to individual company stations. Yes, one can still hear "other" radio signals outside of the ham bands. There still exist the strange hum-roar of 12 KHz commercial SSB here and there on HF but those are far less numerous than they were three to four decades ago. There's lots more 'new' sounds of all the various TORs that "others" use on HF and, once in a while, a rare CW signal. :-) Thousands of old HF stations for non-ham use have been closed down worldwide and equipment dismantled or just junked. Some of the USA transcontinental microwave (FM) long-distance relay system are still in use and up (visible to anyone driving cross-country) but fiber-optics and very high-speed digital time-multiplexed carrier services carry much of the long-distance telephone signals if not relayed via commsats. Such is longer-lived and more reliable. It's difficult for many to reconcile the changes that have happened in communications in just a half century but that's how it went down. On a more consumer-oriented basis, the broadcasting industry is generally wondering what will become of all those old analog TV transmitters after the transition to HDTV in the USA. There's no easy answer for that, either. 73, Len AF6AY |
#7
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![]() "BNB Sound" wrote in message oups.com... 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. My great uncle was a professional morse operator originally in the RAF but then as a civilian on weather research aircraft that monitored clouds and weather for weather forecasting. He used to send the reports to the ground via HF. Then he did some time with the civilian search and rescue service manning a base station which was also on HF (coordinating the rescue helicopters and aircraft). |
#8
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both the United States eastern missle test range and western missle test
range have modern HF sites that are operated by civilian contracters. Computer Sciences Raytheon operates the eastern test range. Henry |
#9
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Sir/Mam,
I have brought home the "paycheck" for just under 30 years.....mostly x-band SatCom. An electrical engineer by profession, I have also been heavily envolved wit HF, meteror burst, line of sight et al. The jjobs are out there....most all are Government...US "and" others....almost all require security clearances. check federal employment registers...."civil service".....etc. ! Henry |
#10
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This is all great stuff. I read every page of the stories from the
Coast Guard. Every ham has favorite experiences on the air. Does anyone have any favorite experiences from working on the air? 73, Thanks and keep 'em coming, KC2PNF Jon |
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