Hi Lisa!! Good to hear from you, and glad you made it back. I like the pic of the microwave tower. Two That's the kid of stuff I used to work on when I was on active duty overseas.

 

Yep, farmers must lease out their land for all of that equipment. That picture was actually a bit of an accident. I was trying to get a shot of all of the wind generators...there were hundreds of them..and they are massive! The photos don't do them justice. LOTS of windpower out in the Des Moines area.

 

Yep. There are several around here. Most of those are offline and being taken down. I have to drive out past one tomorrow -- I'll get a pic of it with just the frames for all the feedhorns and waveguide. It's actually kind of sad. All that long-haul tropo/microwave stuff is going the way of the dinosaurs.

This is kind of random, but relates to what we were just talking about. I've been researching the old systems I used to work on and attempting to find the site locations in Google Earth. Not exactly easy, but I managed to find almost all the ones around me in Europe/Turkey. After literally years (I started this "project" back when I got laid off in Dec '06), I now found a site that has done all the work already. It actually has a bunch of the old Soviet radio sites, too. A lot of the sites are either gone already (and you can only see remnants of the site), or aren't in hi-res.

It's kind of cool, in a really geeky kind of way, but you can also see all the DEW Line sites, and the White Alice system in Alaska/Northern Canada. "DEW" stands for Distant Early Warning, and was the old radar system used watch for over the pole launches by the "Ruskies". But the cool part is that you can also see that it's tied in through the sites/systems I worked on in Italy through Greece & Turkey for, well, retaliation I guess. You can also see a couple sites on the Black Sea, which I can, ahem, speculate were used as listening posts, since Russia is just across the sea...

I find it fascinating, but I'm big time radio geek. There are other systems there as well -- the old comm systems that I guess were there when we were in Iran, Vietnam, Japan, even one between FL & Cuba before that relationship went to crap. Sorry for the random OT in the OT. And all that from a single pic. LOL.

Oh, here's the link, if any of you want to take a look. It really is kind of neat part of the Cold War history.
Troposcatter Communication Networks

BTW, I worked on the 486L Medcom & E-TA systems. You might notice the Ace-High system is kind of parallel to those -- our stuff replaced it. Most (all?) of those sites were shut down in the 60s/70s. My stuff went off-line in the early 90s.

 

Last time I was at work I snapped a few pictures.

If we can get going writing books about radio towers I wonder what you'll have to say about these.

The 6.uhoh

The inside of the shop. It's a little messy if you couldn't tell.

The CAT. My snow clearing chariot.

 

No sparks there for a book, at least from me. Maybe one of the other guys will get "inspired". LOL...

 

Well, I hope everyone had a great weekend! I certainly cant complain about mine!

Gonna read the 7 or so new pages to catch up!

 

What do you mean?

You know you can change it so each page shows more posts.

 

A friend called,was traveling from SW Fla to Charleston SC and his Excursion kept trying to die on him
Think I have him going,been bout a hr since his last call

 

GOOD JOB!! What was it?

 

low on oil

 

I can start to see my lawn again. The snow is melting away.

That's the way that I used to do it. The mower will reduce the volume of yard waste by 90%.

Lisa those pictures look good.

 

Yeah no kidding Dan! Only my yard has been replaced by a lake... J/K!

Thats a lot of snow we just had and to get rid of it in a day or two makes a mess!

 

Cat missed us.

Pete that Jeep doesn't look too bad. A vehicle is a vehicle. Maybe the parents want you to practice on something smaller before you start in on the 7.3?

 

Maybe. But why? The only thing I ever drive now is dad's 6.0 which is pictured above. It's bigger than my 7.3 and I don't have any issues with it.

And yes a vehicle is a vehicle. But I don't want that damn vehicle. I want my vehicle.

 

Oh gotcha, Good job on helping him out.