User talk:Fortheloveofbacon

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April 2012

Transit

There were two main variants of station as I recall. Those that had tracking receivers such as I had at 019 and those that had separate receivers and tracking filters such as at 192 (UT/ARL Austin, TX) . I did visit the station at APL but I don't remember anything about it. 019 was the second station to have its STRU (I don't remember what it stood for, but it was very temperamental) replaced by the TBD (Time burst detector) which worked flawlessly. I carried it down to McMurdo as part of my luggage in 1974. The stations that used tracking receivers were more compact. In 1975, the equipment at 019 was changed out for a tracking filter type arrangement. It was my task to decommission and pack the old station. We acquired the building next door and left the antennas where they were so we were still 019.

My recollection is that the antennas were quarter-wave stubs with 4 ground rods each at 45 degrees or maybe 60 degrees. The antennas were in pairs. The distance between the antennas of each pair is determined by some formula and was somewhat critical. My recollection is that there is a "center" between the antennas that was closer to one than to the other. My two pairs were arraigned roughly in a parallelogram to have the same center, I think. There is a pair for 150MHz/400MHz for the Transit satellites and I think 162/324 for the Beacons. If station 002 was moved before the Beacon program it wouldn't have had the second set. Each time the antennas moved, the station got a new number.

At most locations there was an in-line preamp for each antenna as close to the antenna as possible. This wasn't possible at McMurdo since it was too cold for the electronics to operate. I recall that 019's data was a little noisier than other stations. I attributed that to the placement of the preamps and generally noisier EM spectrum at the poles. There is an anecdote about that. When I got there, the station had a bad transistor in the refraction correction unit that making a lot of noise. That's the way it was when I got there, and so I thought that was normal. About two months later I got a nasty message from APL about it. Why did they let it go that long? It went that long because the Air Force was about to launch a beacon satellite and tracking those was paying the bills. Once I knew there was a problem it was pretty easy to find the bad component. I also guessed that a Beacon was about to launch. These were very valuable and we were expected to manually acquire the satellite and monitor it throughout the pass. If it went high over head, there was a null in the antenna pattern and the equipment would lose lock. The automatic control would give up at that point, so we were there to reacquire the Beacon when it came out of the null. The darn things came about every 80 minutes I think for about 20 hours a day. It obviously took two people to cover 20 hours.Constant314 (talk) 05:35, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

• I surmise from this story that you are a Longhorn of some variety? The station 002 that I am referring to is, I assume, no longer. There is a small building (http://www.flickr.com/photos/17903031@N00/5992587076/) (map: http://g.co/maps/5rtz8) next to the Texas Memorial Museum that houses a casting of some dinosaur tracks. Next to it is a plaque (on the small concrete cube about 25% of the way across the bottom of the picture, next to the stairs) bearing the identification number 002, but the start and end dates of operation are blank. (Someone with a similar curiosity has posted a photograph (http://www.smragan.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/plaque.jpg). There are various theories around campus at to what, exactly, the back story is. I've looked for antennae in the configuration you describe, and they definitely do not exist near the plaque. I haven't been able to find anything matching your description in the vicinity of the building, in fact, and every list that I can find of installed stations strangely omits the 002 designation. I supposed there could be a short dipole concealed under the roofline, but from your description that doesn't seem adequate. Some think that the equipment is buried underground, but I find this unlikely. Given my understanding of its operation, and your description of the degree of automation, I can only assume that all of the stations were manned. My personal hunch, is that the building initially housed Transit equipment, but was repurposed. I'm also told that there is still equipment operating at the J. J. Pickle Research Campus so unless UT had two installations, I suppose it was moved there and renumbered. Of course, the dinosaur tracks may simply be a rouse to conceal some sort of covert project taking place right under our very noses... Your thoughts? ℱorƬheℒoveofℬacon ✉ • ✍ 06:26, 24 April 2012 (UTC)