Pictures of Nome (Shaktoolik, Golovin: airplane, station, rating)

[Лютый]

Originally Posted by gdude

16 and 10 months.

Got it.

[blueflames50]

Originally Posted by gdude

16 and 10 months.

we got this go'n on two threads Dude!! but ? for ya...have ya thought of doing college in Alaska????

[Rance]

I used to go to the whitealice radar site up behind Homer and load up the trunk of my car with copper cable. Then I'd drive to Soldotna and sell it to the recycle center for beer money.
There were two radar dishes and one was pointing straight up. The thing was huge. We pulled a bike up there and rode around that dish for hours. You could get going really good and be laid right over sideways going round and round in the dish.

Nice shot's of Nome!

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by Rance

I used to go to the whitealice radar site up behind Homer

That is impossible.

You need to make the distinction between a White Alice Communications System site (which provides telecom services) and a radar facility. The White Alice system was built to provide communication to the Air Control & Warning radar sites, so virtually every AC&W had a co-located WACS site. But the reverse was not at all true. Most WACS sites were not within hundreds of miles of a radar site. The WACS site itself had no radar of course. (Diamond Ridge was the name of the WACS site located near Homer. There was never a radar site nearby.)

One interesting point that applies to locations like Bethel and Nome is that initially there were AC&W radar sites there, built in the early 1950's. But then in 1963 McNamara executed a military cutback, and among the bases in Alaska that were shutdown were the radar sites at Bethel and Nome.

That had an interesting effect too, because at the time the Russians had fighter planes based in the Russian Far East (as our Russian friend wants it to be correctly referred to as!) that were faster than those we had located here in Alaska. (We had fighter wings at Elmendorf and Eielson, with a single fighter rotating to each of the forward bases as Galena, King Salmon and Cold Bay.) In later years there was always a lot of attention given to how the Russians flew Bear bomber aircraft along our borders to measure our reaction time... but you didn't see any newspaper headlines in the 1960's telling how they were sending fighter aircraft deep into Alaska!

The old radar equipment available at the time was not necessarily always able to have enough range, even with the original site configurations, to spot a fighter low to the ground moving on a line directly between two radar sites, but from 1963 until we based a faster fighter plane in Alaska (about 1970), the Russian fighter pilots pretty much had free reign to fly around Alaska. They enjoyed the game, and once in a while would buzz a village runway for fun.

The pilots flying from Elmendorf and Eielson, unlike those at the forward bases, actually did face a bit of danger! Nobody was worried about a shoot out with a Russian, they all wanted to go home at night too! But Elmendorf and Eielson were both surrounded by Niki missle sites, and our pilots were apparently (to read the stories they've written since) were quite worried about being mis-identified when returning to base and having somebody get excited and push the button, launching a missle at them thinking they were the Russians!

Today of course there are new radars, and since maybe the middle 1970's they've been manned by civilians instead of the USAF. The sites are no longer "short range" either, and are officially called a "Long Range Radar Site". But the primary purpose today is to track intercontinential commercial air traffic.

[Rance]

Everyone in Homer I knew at the time called it "the white alice radar site". I know nothing about if it's radar or not. All I know is it has or had two giant aluminum dishes mounted on some tall white tower like structures, and was chock full of copper cable as thick as my arm.

[Floyd_Davidson]

Originally Posted by Rance

Everyone in Homer I knew at the time called it "the white alice radar site". I know nothing about if it's radar or not. All I know is it has or had two giant aluminum dishes mounted on some tall white tower like structures, and was chock full of copper cable as thick as my arm.

Nahhh.

Diamond Ridge had a 275 foot steel tower for a TD-2 microwave link to Soldotna through repeaters (the nearest one to Diamond Ridge was 14 miles away at Starisky Creek). That tower is probably still there, though the original antennas would have been changed long ago. The current antennas might be aluminum, but the originals certainly were not.

There originally were 4 troposcatter antennas, one pair to Big Mountain (on Lake Illiamna) and one pair to Pillar Moutain (on Kodiak Island). Those were 75 foot high steel "billboard" towers, made of thick steel plating (I'm thinking 3/8", but it might have been even thicker than that. They were built literally like a battleship). The face of the antenna was 15 feet above ground, and was a 60' parabolic surface.

There was actually no copper cable anywhere near that large. There were copper pipes for glycol coolant and similar sized (6" diameter) copper coax transmission lines, which might be mistaken for "cable".

The Diamond Ridge site, back when it was White Alice and the old troposcatter was being used, was widely reputed to be one of, if not the absolute, best site in the system. Whether true or not, it certainly was one of the nicest places but the effect of that reputation was that technicians would decide it was the only place for them, and they would sit on a remote site for 5-7 years waiting to have enough seniority to bid on a job opening at Diamond Ridge.

Of course, 5 years at places like Cape Romanzof, Shemya or Lisburne had effects on people who did it. Some of them even recovered... :-)

Neklassan Lake, in Palmer, was another site that had the same reputation... and that site was even bigger with a lot going on all the time.

[Rance]

These were not towers that tall. Nothing like the tower in Anchor Point or between Kenai/Soldotna. They were white and built like a battle ship of steel plate as you mentioned. And the dishes were probably 60' across. This was 20 some odd years ago and I used a hacksaw to cut the cableing. It was pretty good size what ever it was.
The site is/was located on Olson Mountain up behind Homer.

[Лютый]

Hello, everyone!

[Лютый]

Hey ... Megan ! Where are you? Where are the pictures of Nome?

[MeganAK]

[quote=Лютый;8439160]Megan, do any Russians live in Nome?[/quoteh

There are a handful, but not many. It seems like there were more when I lived down in Southcentral Alaska. There was a pretty decent amount of Russian folk living on the Kenai and in Cordova. I used to meet them coming through the Whittier Tunnel.


Train to Nowhere

One of the villages in the Region (can't remember if it is Golovin or Shatoolik, sorry!

The White Alice

Gold Dredge

More Dredge

More Dredge

Mmmm, freshly caught crab.


The not-so-scenic realistic Nome