Bill Horne wrote on Tues 6 May 2008 00:54

AF6AY wrote:

I said we were a trained corps of "_operators_", not just CW operators.
I know that military radios almost always use voice: I ran the Navy MARS
station at Danang in 1971 and 1972. I got the job because I had a ham
license and I was there, and the unit commander cared about what I could
_do_, not what my MOS was.

The Military Affiliate Radio System was never a part of the
tactical or strategic radio communications effort/network/system
within the US military since it began (under another name) in
pre-WWII US Army. It was generally considered to be a Public
Relations activity akin to Special Services functions such as
the AFRS (later changed to AFRTS, Armed Forces Radio and
Television Service) or the Special Service traveling sports
teams. Those of us who did the 24/7 grunt work of keeping all
units communicating with one another did not consider MARS to
be 'great.' None of us 24/7 grunt communicators required any
federal license to do our jobs.

FWIW, CW still came in handy on a couple of occasions: when signals
dropped too low for phone patches, I could slide the KWM-2A down to the
ham band and operate "maritime mobile" on CW to get health-and-welfare
traffic through. One occasion I remember involved a seaman with a
pregnant wife who was headed home on emergency leave due to
complications of some kind: I'll never forget the look on his face when
I read him the reply to the "ARL Two, ARL Nineteen" priority message I
had sent minutes before - "Your wife and newborn son both OK
congratulations dad".

FWIW, I can relate a similar tale. The 250-TTY torn-tape relay
floor at ADA Control had many operators on each shift. Each was
assigned a group of circuits. TTY tape was chadless, both
punched and printed. Red Cross and other agencies got lowest
priority handling after the start of the 'radio day' (about 2 AM
local time). One TTY operator spotted a message to another on his
shift. He showed the tape to his friend who was overjoyed at the
news that he was now a newborn father. Red Cross people wanted
to pass the message to recipient in person. New father blurted
out "I already knew it." That sparked a lot of indignity to the
officials who only thought of 'procedure' and 'order of things.'
He was reported to his company commander. CO was caught in a
bind, being good to his men but also having to play politics
with higher officials. I did some mild pleading of his case,
suggesting Company Punishment (similar to Captain's Mast in USN).
CO caught the drift and, knowing I had been scheduled as CQ
(Charge of Quarters) that night, remanded his 'punishment' to
me to handle while on CQ. Newborn father was still feeling good
despite being chewed out so his 'punishment' was largely to keep
me from falling asleep while on the 5 PM to 8 AM next-day CQ
period. NO MARS involvement there, none needed.

BTW, a military purchased Collins KWM-2 is the AN/FRC-93 and
is the commercial version with all crystals, not limited to
amateur radio bands (of 1975). There's an FRC-93 TM on
the Internet, PDF size of about 6 MB. I have one. It is
essentially the technical manual written, produced by Collins.

In three years of my assignment with ADA in the Army, there
was only ONE day of a two-hour total radio blackout on HF in
1955. Minimum RF power output at ADA was 1 KW on HF. That is
only 10 db higher than typical ham radio HF transmitters.
All operations were 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and
remained that way until 1963 when Army downsizing had all ops
transferred to USAF, equipment, sites and all. USAF gave it
all up with sites, buildings given to the Japanese in 1978.
That was 30 years ago.

AF6AY