Why the US Navy once wanted to turn Wisconsin into the world's largest antenna. Who Gnu?
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/10/8381983/project-sanguine
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Why the US Navy once wanted to turn Wisconsin into the world's largest antenna. Who Gnu?
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/10/8381983/project-sanguine
I had heard about that before, I think the Russkies have one that still works.
ELF does some weird things.
Titty Sprinkles for the WIN!
Copper County, how appropriate can that be? ELF is nothing new, the German HOMAAG station on Tuckers Island (now Mystic Island) in Tuckerton, NJ used a 200KW alternator feeding an umbrella antenna was built in 1910 to communicate with Germany using CW on 16.1KHz. As a matter of fact most Navy ELF stations used umbrella antennas like this one, NPG in Dixon, California on 55KHz and the only one that used that "grounded power line" I know of was (here it is) Clam Lake, WI on 76KHz. The largest array, cables strung between a forest of towers like a huge capacitor was the Harold E. Holt Naval Base at Exmouth, West Australia, way too large to be pictured here. A smaller version is used by WWVB Fort Collins, CO 60KHz sending slow speed digital to synchronize "atomic clocks" like the one on my wall.
There's a L-O-N-G story behind what was at the end of Radio Road in Tuckerton, but briefly it wasn't long before it was discovered the Germans were using high speed machine generated CW, way to fast for human copy to send spy messages. The US Navy took it over briefly and later sold it to commercial interests that built several more transmitters on the island. Time and technology march on and the stations went dark, late in the 1950s the huge antenna came down covered by TV news paving the way for a housing development I lovingly call Mistake Island notorious for drug related criminal activity. All that remain are the power house and half of the smoke stack, the building occupied by a construction contractor and the transmitter building as the warehouse. There are a few huge concrete dead man weight guy anchor blocks scattered about and the 200 ton monster of them all, the tower base square in the middle of a road of all places. I had the pleasure of driving around the island looking at the remains and visiting the little museum in Tuckerton housing what relics remain of Tuckerton Wireless.
Once again the misinformed enviro-hippies killed an interesting project. "Hey folks... that ELF is deadly man..."..