The good news is that Chuck Rippel's shop down in Chesapeake looks like
the Ft. Devens radio refit facility did thirty years back. He has racks
and racks of 390s in for repair, and he has all the special tooling and
jigs for module testing. So you still have the depot level support that
the military provided, it's just that Chuck is providing it now.

I remember hearing about the Ft. Deven facility. I was never there,
but most of the Army GI's who worked for me trained there. As I worked
with all of the services, I got guys who came from all the schools,
Devens, Pensacola, Goodfellow and others. They seemed to have
different syllabi for training, often contradictory. I was the Program
Manager for the overall project and I didn't have specific
responsibility for the guys who actually worked in the maintenance
shops. My job was really to see that there WAS a maintenance shop and
that someone had responsibilty to train the folks and staff the
facilities, so it was far more political than practical. Since I had a
ham ticket and the guys in the shop knew that I knew which end of a
soldering iron was hot, they cut me a lot more slack than they would
with the average "suit" who came in from Washington. I tried not to
say "We're from HQs, we're here to help you."

Is Chuck Rippel in Chesapeake VA????

Jon W3JT
--scott