Just a quick post because of Pearl Harbor Day. As a former resident of the 50th state this day resonates with me at my roots. I used to live in a tiny village named Wahiawa HI. If you switch to the satellite view you can see the base I used to live on when I was in 1st and 2nd grade, off to the right of Whitmore Village. When I lived there it was NCS Wahiawa, now it’s MCCS Wahiawa. When I was living there, there was only the one Comsat and another military communications satellite, and almost all military communications was on the HF band bouncing off the ionosphere. That’s the main reason why I got bounced around so much as a kid, to talk to different places you had to use transmitters in different places to get the right number of skips to hit your desired destination. That’s why there used to be an NCS in NE, and another one in MN, several in TX, one in TN inside Ft. Campbell KY… and two in HI because the chain is several hundred miles long you can get multiple destinations from the state by using different islands, with sunken cables between the islands to carry information from Oahu to one of the outer islands. Which island I have no idea because I was a little kid and this was not a common topic of conversation.
Now there were two stations I knew about in Morocco, because there were families at both of them and we all went to the same school because there weren’t enough kids to have separate schools for each base after elementary school particularly. We lived in Sidi Yahia, the other com station was Bouknadel on the coast, and we all went to school at the air base outside Kenitra. I went to Kenitra American Junior/Senior High School in 7th grade even though we were living at NCS Sidi Yahia.
Thank you for following me down Memory Lane. Another short post tomorrow.
Witch on a Bicycle 