Radio and Travel Inspired Ramblings

 Was stationed at NSGA Edzell (an old RAF base) from 1974-77 (CTM2 in the Teletype shop inside the Comm Center). got a local out and spent a year camping around Europe on my BMW R90/6 motorcycle. My ham radio callsign was GM5BKC,  I spent a lot of early mornings on 40m CW before a daywatch when we were on the 2/2/96 schedule.  

  Spent 3 months, the summer of 1975, assigned to JOOD (Junior Officer Of the Day) duty for the Maint Division, each Division in the SecGru building had to supply a Petty Office to Base Security for a few months.  The JOOD watch was manning the Main Gate guard shack.  I got to know all the local police when they stopped by the Main Gate for coffee in the early morning hours. They all learned to recognize my BMW on the road, there weren't many big motorcycles in that part of Scotland then! Friday and Saturday nights were fun when all the local women came to the base to go to the EM club.  Pubs closed at 10pm but the Enlisted Men's Club on Base stayed open until 2AM.

RAF Edzell Enlisted barracks, 1974

Bruce Wheeler and I went riding together a lot. Here are our bikes on a little ferry in western Scotland, making our way to Skye (his bike is the brown one).

 

 

While in the Navy I never got as far west as WESTPAC*, but almost got there by going East...

QUIC Van on USS Brumby

 

WESTPAC - various Navy duty in the Western Pacific area 

Tin Cans  - Navy ships of the various Destroyer classes

TAD -  Temporary Additional Duty, except for some it was actually your regular job

DIRSUP - Direct Support, Teams of Navy Cryptologic Technicians with equipment to provide intelligence to the Commanding Officer of a ship that the regular Navy wouldn't have access to.

BAQ - housing allowance the Navy gave us to live off-base

OIC - Officer In Charge

Navy Detailer - Person in the U.S. that schedules military personnel duty assignments

 In 1973 and '74 I used the MARS* station (SV0WY) at the US Air Force base in Athens, Greece, when flying from Rota, Spain to various ships on Navy TAD* (DIRSUP)* trips. I was a Navy Cryptologic Technician, Maintenance (CTM3). The Air Force C-130 cargo planes that we used to transport the NavSecGru QUIC Vans to other ports for installation on Navy destroyers usually flew to Athens from our base at NSGA Rota.

Being Navy (not Air force) they wouldn't give me a key to the station so once in there I had to stay all night with no trips out for food, but a sacrifice worth all the fun!! Lots of paper logs, the Air Force MARS operator (a non-ham) told me I had to answer all the QSL cards that came for my radio contacts myself, ha..  I had to have QSL cards to send back printed, too.

The station had no straight key or any way to send Morse code and get on CW.  When I got on 20m SSB (voice) it was always a huge pileup, SSB wasn't the norm from everywhere yet (in 1974) and even Greece was fairly rare on SSB.  I've always been a CW op and didn't really enjoy fone operating but what the hell, you have to have fun where you can !!  The beautiful Collins S-Line radio and 30S-1 amplifier to a big log-periodic antenna aimed at the US did just fine even at the bottom of the 11 year solar cycle!!

  The "pileups" were incredible.  I had been a licensed ham since 1968 but had never operated fone, only CW (Morse code).  The first time I was there the AF guy showed me how to tune up the radio and the big amp, got things setup on 20m and he went home.  I tuned around the band and listened to two loud stations talking on the East Coast, I broke in and said hello from Greece!  They were shocked and happy to include me in their conversation, and one of them warned me that I would have LOTS of people calling when we finished and they signed off.

Each time I traveled through Athens in 1973 and '74 I stopped at the MARS station to get on the air for a while.

*MARS - Military Affiliate Radio System, where military radio ops use amateur radio to pass messages from overseas locations to the US, many times making "phone patches" so soldiers, airmen and sailors could talk to their families at home.

*TAD - Temporary Additional Duty, other work away from your regular duty station.

*DIRSUP - Direct Support, where teams of operators with special training in intercepting various kinds of radio signals would be on a Navy ship to give extra intelligence to the Captain of the ship that he couldn't get from the normal equipment on Navy ships.

  Our Navy DIRSUP shop in Rota, Spain put the SecGru 'QUIC vans' on a lot of FRAM-2 destroyers (affectionately called tin cans by destroyer sailors), we always "hid" them in the then-unused DASH hanger. We even tied into the 15 kHz IF of the ship's sonar and used a VLF receiver to tune it and listen to the Russians underwater "Gertrude" voice comms between their ships and subs.  We didn't transmit from our vans, receive only from VLF thru UHF, monitoring mostly Russian radio communications.

 

QUIC (for Quick Intercept Capability) Van, Cryptologic Technicians' home aboard ship.

R-1401 VLF/LF Receiver, 1 Khz thru 600 Khz. Tied into ships SONAR receiver IF

 One FUN thing I did while on a ship for a few months was to sit the CTR posit while they got Midrats. The CT team on a destroyer would only have 2 guys to copy CW (the CTR rating). They stood Port and Starboard watches (something like 4 hrs on, 4 hrs off), usually copying Russian ships checking into their ship-to-shore nets, or CW signals from local countries in Africa, some were police nets on CW. At sea I didn't have much to do unless some equipment broke, so being a ham that only used CW, I helped them by sitting their posit to give the ops breaks, once they taught me the format they used for copying all the signals on a mill. At night I would copy the Russian traffic on an electric mill for the op on duty so he could get Midrats, the other CTR would be sleeping.

R-390A HF receiver

    Otherwise my job was to babysit the gear and fix things, and teach new ops on their first trip how to operate the shipboard equipment. Most CT ops (CTO, CTT, CTI types) never saw that stuff at the shore stations. 

KW-7 TTY Crypto

 

KW-7 showing plugboard wires.  The wire jumpers were changed each day to implement a different encryption (and decryption) "key" combination.

 We got all the screw-ups on the TAD trips, they were sent out on the ships as punishment. Unfortunately it actually was my job to go TAD on the ships. We had a separate shop inside the big Wullenweber HFDF antenna array at Rota where we repaired and did PM's on equipment from the vans when they weren't on a destroyer. 

 

 In 1977 and 1978 I was living in NE Scotland, having gotten out of the US Navy there earlier in 1977.

 I decided to take flying lessons towards getting certified in sailplanes, also known as gliders.

 I lived not far from the Deeside Gliding Club, Aboyne Airfield, about 20 miles inland from Montrose on the Scotland coast.  elevation is about 400 ft above sea level.

The club members gave lessons in a Capstan T49 sailplane, an unusual 2-seat configuration sitting side-by-side. 
It is a high-winged monoplane glider of wooden construction, they were built in the 1960's.  People used to want to fly it solo, with a counterweight mounted in the other seat, because it was very roomy and a fairly good performance sailplane.

One day in January with great wave conditions coming over the Cairngorm mountains to the west, we had such good lift that we pulled off the tow after only 1000 ft elevation and started to climb much faster than the tow plane could have pulled us, over 1000 ft per minute.  We soared up to 10,000 ft altitude, near the max for not using supplemental oxygen.  The plane had O2 but we hadn't expected to fly that high and weren't hooked up to it.  I flew with the instructor for over an hour, practicing turns and learning to judge speed by the sound and attitude of the cockpit view. We didn't have a radio and the instructor was concerned that someone else might be waiting to fly the 2-seat Capstan, so we decided to head back.  How to kill 9,000 feet of altitude when the plane wanted to keep soaring higher and higher in the mountain wave?  I remember he asked me "how's your stomach today?" and suggested we do a few loops to lose altitude fast.  I said fine and was thrilled when we pointed the sailplane straight down at the ground to gain airspeed !!

Sailplanes are made to be aerobatic because they are frequently flown in very tight circles to stay within rising air currents.  An updraft of air can be caused by fields being warmed by the sun, and rising upcurrents of air are usually very narrow.  Sailplane pilots try to soar from one upcurrent to another, spiraling in tight circles and flying higher until the updraft stops, then gliding across to the next, using birds and clouds to tell them where the rising air pockets are located.

Being built for aerobatics, sailplanes can do loops :-)  With the nose pointed straight down, we got the airspeed up to 100 knots or so and the instructor pulled the stick back hard.  The G-meter went WAY up as we came out of the dive, I looked over at him and his face was flattened out against the seat and I could hardly move.  Up and up we went, past vertical until we were upside down, the airspeed was almost zero and all noise stopped for a second and then the plane continued over the top of the loop and back down..

 We did this two more times and eventually lost enough altitude to land.  That day was a flight I'll never forget !!!  

 When I was TAD* on Navy destroyers in the Indian Ocean in 1974 it was just barely being thought of as a strategic area. Our team of CT* operators on the destroyer was the only team deployed there. Sometimes we went a week with no HF TTY* communications circuit to the rest of the Navy at either Rota (Spain) or Guam shore stations, they had no rhombic antennas aimed at the Indian Ocean. 

For intercepting radar signals from other ships, the destroyer had its own WLR-6 ESM* receiver system and we had one CTT operator assigned to it.   He had a tall stack of classified books (like big Sears catalogs) to look up the parameters of any radar signals he heard, from every known piece of radar equipment of every country in the world. 

He specialized in using the WLR-6 and was frequently able to detect Russian submarines, on the surface or just below with an antenna poking up, or other Russian ships long before the destroyer's radar or lookouts could 'see' them.  It gave the direction the signal came from, as well as other characteristics of the transmitted radar pulses.

 Our op eventually got an official commendation for discovering a new type of Russian radar that no one had heard and documented before!

Glenn AE0Q

T.A.D. - Temporary Additional Duty

CT - US Navy Cryptologic Technician

HF TTY - Long distance, shortwave radio Teletype communications for sending encrypted data (messages) between Navy ships and Navy shore stations.

ESM -  Electronic Support Measures, the provision of military intelligence via a range of electromagnetic surveillance and collection devices.  Mostly for listening for radar signals from other ships, aircraft or hidden submarines.

CIC - combat information center

 This is a work-in-progress, I'll be adding more later :-)

After I was separated from the U.S. Navy in April 1977 at the base at RAF Edzell in Scotland, I spent a month camping in Scotland, and visiting the Isle of Skye with Bruce, a Navy friend that also had a BMW R90/6 motorcycle.  

 

Then 4 of us from the Navy at Edzell rode and camped on the Isle of Man for the late-May TT Motorcycle races.

Above - Bruce Wheeler at the IoM TT races

 Later in May I packed up the bike for a 5 month trip and left Scotland, heading south to England where I took a ferry from Dover to Calais, France.  I started riding and camping north to Scandinavia.  Getting to the Nordkapp (North Cape) of Norway, way over the Arctic Circle and the farthest point north you can get to in Europe, was my goal :-)  The Nordkapp was 900 miles NORTH of the Arctic Circle, driving by (mostly gravel) road !

Bike packed on the day I left Marykirk, Scotland on my trip around Europe

My DX adventure that summer took me through 23 DXCC countries via motorcycle. I met many hams along the way, stopping whenever I saw big antennas, and rode 45,000 miles (72,500 km) on the BMW in Europe and Great Britain.

 

 While riding north up the Norwegian coast in 1977, one place I camped in was Tromso, Norway above the Arctic Circle.  I was getting low on money (VERY low, only $10 or so left) and called my parents in Minnesota on the telephone to WIRE me some of my money that was in a joint bank account with them. I had already talked to the local bank manager and I gave my parents all the bank info.  Every day for a week I went to the bank in the afternoon to see if they had my money, after a few days everyone there knew who I was :-)  Day after day, never any money, I had run out and was getting really worried, until finally it showed up at the bank in the MAIL. My mom later told me they mailed it to save the bank wire fees, but I was out of money for a week while waiting for it! 

When I was hanging around Tromso with no money I met a German and his girlfriend, also riding a BMW motorcycle.  They told me about a local motorcycle club HMCK that had a clubhouse (Harry MC Klub, named after Harry the club founder).  I could stay there for free for a few days, the German couple had stayed at the clubhouse for the night. The club members didn't live there but did party at night, they were friendly and it was great that they let me stay there for a week! 

With much of Norway, Sweden and Finland remote and forested it was easy to find places to camp free most of the summer, although I was chased away once in Sweden.  Sweden is a very organized and regimented country and didn't have the same laws or traditions as Norway and Finland when it came to public use of forests (or Scotland and England, for that matter).  I continued riding and camping north.  The road across the open tundra was made of crushed rock, about the size of a baseball.  Even with the steering damper of the bike on maximum the road was so rough that I couldn't go faster than 30 mph for days at a time.  It was a constant battle to keep the front wheel from suddenly veering right or left.

 Photo above, reindeer crossing sign in Lappland (Sweden), 200 miles north of
the Arctic Circle. Millions of mosquitoes, and roads across the
tundra made of crushed rock the size of a baseball.
I carried two spare tires with me.

One day I came across two young women in far northern Norway, hitchhiking south on a gravel road (well, the ONLY road up there was gravel) in the middle of nowhere on the tundra! I was going north up to the North Cape, but I stopped to ask them what they were doing there because it was so isolated and remote!  I couldn't have given even one of them a ride as the back of my bike was packed with camping gear and two spare tires. We talked for a bit and they said they were cousins, traveling to see their own country for a few weeks.  The older one gave me her parent's address in southern Sweden and told me to stop and see her later in the summer.  A month or so later I stayed at her family's house for a few days, it turned out that she was a former Miss Sweden.

While at the Nordkapp I met Norwegian Richard Bekklund and his girlfriend, also traveling by motorcycle.  He gave me his parents address in southern Norway, I stayed there for a week later in the summer, his parents took the 3 of us (Richard, his girlfriend and me) to see lots of tourist and historical things in the area where they lived. 

Midnight at the North Cape, Norway.  The sun never set for months !

After camping at the North Cape (Nordkapp) I rode east to Kirkenes on the Norway - Russia border.  I couldn't go into Russia because of the job I had while in the Navy.  Going south on a back road 80 miles or so into Finland, I camped along the shore of Lake Inari.  The sun never went down all "night" as it was still far above the Arctic Circle, and the lake looked VERY prehistoric in the low shadows of evening.  This was a spooky setting and I was quite uncomfortable camping there, but like most places where I pitched my tent in the woods it was free.  It was quite an eerie place to see.

Lake Inari, northern Finland near Russia

 I continued riding and camping south through the forests to Helsinki on the Baltic.  I had been there in 1973 when the USS New, a Navy destroyer that I was working on for 2 months, stopped there for a few days.  I wanted to see Helsinki again while I had more time to spend sightseeing.

From southern Finland it was possible to take a big car ferry across the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden, but it cost a lot of money and I wasn't in any hurry.  I continued riding and camping north from Helsinki up the coast and around the Gulf to Sweden, down the Swedish coast and stopping at the Swedish girl's house for a week, then across to Norway to the Bekklund's home.

(work in progress)

  After riding through Germany into Austria and Lichtenstein I ended up in Italy.  Instead of riding across the Alps mountains on the Simplon Pass, I decided to take the car-transporting train through the mountain tunnel.  

 

What the heck, a different adventure, right? 

  Welll, being a motorcycle, not a car, they directed me into a small box car.  Hmmm, I almost changed my mind but I had already paid for the ticket.   Probably safer than being on an open flatbed, right?  The side door was left open a bit, it was light in the boxcar, I put the BMW on the centerstand and leaned against the bike.

Small boxcar for motorcycles and bicycles through the train tunnel

   Eventually the train started moving, jerking a bit and slowly gaining speed, poking along into the mountain.  And then it got DARK!  In a boxcar, swaying side to side and jerking a bit front to back, with absolutely NO light, it was instant vertigo!  I almost fell over, having no reference to up or down.  Very near panic, I suddenly remembered the bike running light, turned on the ignition to the first position and had a dim light to see the walls and floor of the boxcar, that was a REALLY close call...  I probably should have ridden over the mountain pass for the scenery, but the train ride WAS different, hahaha.

  Stopped at the BMW shop in Andorra, between France and Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains, they put on my spare tires, did valve job on BMW, changed suspension springs, installed helicoils in the heads and new valve cover studs, did major service and tuneup, all for $125 !!! 

 To be continued :-)

 My job as a Cryptologic Tech (Maintenance) in the Navy (CTM2) had me going out on destroyers for a few months at a time in the early 70's.  Based in Rota, Spain, we would install an equipment shelter (called a QUIC Van) on a ship while they were in the Mediterranean, and eventually had one on a destroyer in the Indian Ocean.  Our gear inside was almost all receivers (VLF thru UHF) and a team of CT operators would monitor whatever/whoever there was in the area.  We usually had 2 CTR (Morse Code), 2 CTI (Linguists), 2 CTO (TTY Comm circuit ops) and CTT (ESM and other specialized systems) people on the team.  

  This was called DIRSUP (Direct Support) because the CT's on a ship were there to provide direct support to the operations of the ship,  using intelligence that the ship would otherwise not have access to.

The CTR's worked port and starboard watches 24 hrs a day, usually copying Russian ships, or CW signals from local countries in Africa, some were police nets on CW.  Being a ham that only used CW, I sometimes helped them by sitting their posit to give the ops breaks on the mid-watch (midnight shift), once they taught me the format they used for copying all the signals on a mill (an all upper-case typewriter).

For our own communications to the rest of the Navy we tied into the ship URC-32 1 KW output HF transceivers for our encrypted teletype (TTY) transmissions to a Navy shore station, using the other sideband of the URC-32 switched to DSB.  The ships used a UCC-1 frequency-division multiplex system to put sixteen 85Hz wide tone channels on each sideband.  Some channels were set aside for the NavSecGru to use.  

The Indian Ocean was a radio dead zone.  The I.O. wasn't a very strategic area for the Navy and the big shore stations (Rota and Guam) didn't have rhombic antennas aimed there.

 

 

Photo of CTO at Model 28 ASR, with two Mod 28 UGC-20 receive-only printers to his right.

 It was spooky being on a ship that far out and not having any 2-way communications.  I could copy hams on the various CW ham bands 24 hrs a day but the ship couldn't get a teletype circuit up.  It was amazing and very frustrating.

On one TAD trip the ops woke me up early one morning at Oh-dark-thirty and said the Fleet broadcast TTY printer quit working.  I went into the van and there was a distinct shoe-print on the front of the UGC-25 gray cabinet (read-only teletype printer mounted in a rack 4 feet high). The E-3 O-brancher (CTO) got mad at it when the KWR-37 crypto receiver kept dropping out of sync because of the weak signals on HF shortwave. I had to splice the wiring at the rear that the motor fan had cut when he dislodged the cabinet with his foot.   It was so nice working with professionals :-(  He was one of them sent out with the team as punishment for screwing up back in Rota.

For more detailed descriptions of DIRSUP and QUIC Vans see the link below:

https://stationhypo.com/2021/04/20/quic-vans-guest-post/

A nice description of my job as a CTM3 on trips with the van:

"One of the most challenging Quic van positions was that of the CTM.  Typically filled by a single CTM3/CTM2 on his first enlistment, the mat man needed familiarity with 15-20 different pieces of equipment – receivers, crypto gear, teletype equipment, and auxiliary equipment such as tape recorders, typewriters and air conditioners. In addition to being a CTM, he also worked with ship’s interior communications technicians (IC) and electricians (EM) to ensure van connectivity.  Some assistance could also be provided by ship’s Radiomen (RM) and Electronics Technicians (ET), but in the end the repairs fell onto the shoulders of the mat man, since those other ratings were not cleared for van operations."

As the Maintenance Tech (a Navy E-4 rank) I was responsible for the van while transporting it to and from a ship, sometimes from Spain to Naples, Italy and other times to Athens, Greece,  always on a C-130 cargo plane.  To get a van on a ship in the Indian Ocean, we flew it to Bahrain (in the Persian Gulf) and it was installed on the destroyer USS Brumby there. I was assigned to stay with the van on the ship. After about 6 weeks the Brumby was leaving the Indian Ocean so the van had to be removed by crane in the port of Mombasa, Kenya,  and installed on another destroyer that was coming into the area.  The van and I sat on the dock most of the day with the door locked by a padlock with all the team's classified material inside.  The OIC (Officer In Charge) of the CT Team left me there while they all went to lunch, bar hopping, and souvenir hunting for the day.  I couldn't leave the van and waited for the other destroyer (the USS Paul) to come into port so I could arrange for a crane to load the van on the new ship.  Late in the day, no ship in sight, the OIC came back to the dock and apologized for leaving me there.  I won't mention his name here but I have not forgotten it.  Amazingly, 2 months later back in Rota, Spain, he requested ME as the CTM to go out with him on another team!  Fortunately I was a few months away from transferring to Edzell, Scotland and I didn't have enough time left at Rota to go out with his team again.

Three years later when my enlistment was up I was told that if I stayed in the Navy I would get another DIRSUP job because I did it well and had gotten good recommendations from the Officers I worked for.  That alone was enough to make me get out of the Navy at that point.

 Glenn AE0Q