Interesting thread on Eham.

[gil]

I've never been in the military, but a good joke in electronics school was to take a ceramic capacitor, plug it in the wall socket, then leave it in plain sight on a lab table... Hehehe...

Gil.

[Archangel320420]

p.s.  I discovered and had my first Doctor Pepper at the operations building in Scotland. Pepper was new then I think. I had never had one before this. It was either a cup of coffee or a can of Pepper always in my hand from then on. I think I ruined my taste buds on that drink. I don't like it or any soft drinks now. Ithink it turned the tongue purple or blue. I also learned how and what a microwave oven was. I had NO idea how to use it until Gunny came and pushed the buttons. It did not warm up the food at all otherwise, I had just turned the timer on but did not push any button to start. Microwave cooking in 1970. Imagine that! Who ever heard of such a thing?

[Archangel320420]

Your a monster, Gil.  ouch

[RadioRay]

Hey ArcAngel -

That's good to know.  The fine art of 'lighting-up' a fellow op - or a visiting field grade officer on occasion, really needed to be seen to be appreciated, so because you've been there & done THAT, let me share for those who haven't.

We put all intercepts onto a 'MILL or a KSR/ASR  - think BIG type writers. The copy paper in there was 6,9,12 ply mill paper had that amazingly thin carbon paper in it, so a hook on 6 feet of that into a guys belt loop as he walked by and then lite the end.  Ha!  What a way to raise kids. Good to know that CT's could share in the fun too.  Maybe these guys were just shy.

Send bogus CW transmissions to a FNG at his position.

Ha! You did this stuff too?  One of the places I worked was entirely in it's own can, so we were isolated even from the inner field station. I found remnants of an old intercom system for the ops headsets .... . long story short and right after a standard short tranining on what to do if we come across an "SOS", a few hours from the end of shift change, Debbie Dawgs - the braaaaand new fem-op got this message. Man - when it got through to her what she heard, her training kicked in and she was ON IT!  I was sending it, which she did not know and by watching her from across the room and behind two racks, I metered my speed that she could not lift a hand to wave for the trick chief, no-yell, because she'd miss a dit or two from the noise... I was using my own receiver for the audio 'signal' and varied my BFO pitch to make her occasionally chase the drifting signal with one hand and the other now over tasked for a new OP...

SOS    SOS    SOS   DE USS CORTINA.   
SOS    SOS    SOS   DE USS CORTINA.
SOS    SOS    SOS   DE USS CORTINA.
WE ARE TAKING ON WATER AT LAT xxxxxx  LONG xxxxxxx
REQUIRE IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE

>>> REPEATED<<< BY NOW THE TRICK CHIEF WAS PLUGGED IN AND READING, THEN GLANCED BACK AT ME ON MY df POSITION 'IN THE BACK' , MY HEAD OVER THE RACK WITH 'That Smile'.  He knew this should not linger, but we still had some time.


SOS    SOS    SOS   DE USS CORTINA. ...
WE ARE TAKING ON WATER AT LAT xxxxxx  LONG xxxxxxx   
(The map on the wall showed this to be RIGHT in the middle of the USSR landmass.  - har har)
U R A  FISH    U R A FISH   
(A 'fish' is someone we hooked', but she was such a reflex copy OP that she was not even reading the text she was typing.)
//finally - more slowly so that she'd wonder at the break in cadence: //

D E B B I E    D A W G S     I S  A   FISH BT  LOOK BEHIND YOU.
(IT WAS NOT A 'NICE' LOOK)

She took it well - great gal and a superb 05H.  We gave her a break to relax a few minutes (and to kill me) and gave her time to grow into the subsystem (our group).


A zillion dollars of gear, years of massed training of 'the brightest minds' (?!)  and this is what the tax payers received... Oh, and we do some important stuff too - YOU know the drill.


de RadioRay ..._ ._

[Geek]

This thread is great.  Not only am I no longer concerned with communications during the zombie apocalypse, but I am no longer worried about the NSA reading my email.  They may have my email, but they are using it to set each other on fire instead of reading it.  :-)

[RichardSinFWTX]

Yeah, funny thing about the NSA..They've been able to read everyone's email for YEARS.  It only recently became a news story.

When I was overseas I used to see these PSAs talking about OpSec where everyone was sayings"Hello Ivan" or "Hello Boris" to let you know that the Russians were listening.

These days I've got a few friends who are vets as well and we through out a random "F*** DIRNSA" every now and then.  For those who don't know, that's Director - NSA.  A three or four star officer who runs it.

I'm probably on more than one No-Fly list!!  :)

[WA4STO]

We put all intercepts onto a 'MILL or a KSR/ASR  - think BIG type writers.

This is a KSR:



Notice the lack of tape gear.  Tape was the 1960s version of 'memory'.

And here's an "ASR"



One of the funnest (and stupidest) things I ever did was in 1969 at NSA, in the dead of night at 4am, I found myself in a huge room, just FULL of the ASRs, humming away.  They were not labelled so there was no way to tell who was on the other end.

So I merrily chose a number of different machines at random, furiously typed something like "Greetings from the mother ship at Fort Meade" and rolled the chair on to the next machine, and watched the door very cautiously for what I was hoping were very much asleep Marine guards.

A few guys would type back and for some reason, they'd never divulge where they were.  Gee, imagine that.

Fun times.

73

LH

[Archangel320420]

We were just kids. Thank God for the NCOs who watched over us and treated us as their children. Thus ends my participation in this fun thread.