Something that I had never known about that others might find of interest. I came across a reference from the 1950's referring to the northernmost point of North America for land mass could be considered the DEW Line. It was probably somewhat more commonly known then with the Cold War being waged.
Thanks. I learn something new every day on this board.
> Something that I had never known about that others might find of interest.
> Thanks. I learn something new every day on this board.
Well, great. That makes me feel about 100 years old, because the DEW line was common knowledge to me and my grade school friends. We all thought it would be cool to man one of those frozen, middle-or-nowhere outposts.
Interestingly, one of the problems the military faced in operating these networks was how to keep the lights and equipment on and the troops warm. Diesel (and gasoline) has its problems in the arctic, if you could get it delivered regularly (some of these places are near the edge of earth).
The Army developed a small, stationary low-power nuclear reactor in the late fifties and early sixties that fit the bill. There's lots of ice up there to melt for cooling and steam generation. I believe there are a number of these (and their later versions) that are still operating up there. The program was classified at one time, probably still is.
Oh, and if big-brother is watching and listening...I just heard all this from a guy sitting on the next bar stool. It doesn't have anything to do with any work I ever did with SouthCom. 😉
Here in Ak, we grew up with the White Alice site right up into the '70s. In Kodiak, the road up the mountain behind town was the best sledding hill! Nome still has the towers, they were going to tear them down, but they are such a landmark for snowmachiners traveling into Nome, that they just stripped the asbestos out of them and left the antennas
-JD-
I grew up hearing about the DEW line. There were also a lot of related sites further south.
In college in the early 1970's I worked on an FPS-18 "gap filler" radar in the midwest that had been part of the SAGE network. It seems to me that if the Russians got that far the radar warning wasn't going to be very helpful, so there was probably a lot of pork barrel politics in the siting of those things.
I was working for the university's Meteorology department guys who were trying to turn it into a specialized weather radar to measure rainfall.
I recall that there was one entire 6 foot tall rack cabinet whose function was to be a very slow telephone modem so they could run the site remotely and get its data. The power klystron that made the radar pulses was an assembly on wheels that you rolled into the cabinet and hooked up to high voltage connectors and cooling hoses. One thing you did not want to do was open the high voltage cabinet before it had time to bleed off its charge. There was a safety shorting bar that made a spark that would ring your ears.
Some of those were phased-array antennas. They were flat assemblies that would be steered electronicaly with no moving parts. I thought it was kind of fascinating at the time; I asked about it and was told that I "did not have the need to know." So much for that ...
