[Milsurplus] Jim Creek ( Oso, WA ) Naval Radio

[Hue Miller]

The Jim Creek, Washington station is AFAIK still on the air.
When living in Seattle area early 1960s I built a one-tube
regen from article in QST - "An NAA Receiver"  ( like you
really needed a schematic to work from ).  Jim Creek 
was keyed out of SF CA and so ID'd as "VVV NPG/NLK".
NPG being Navy Radio, San Francisco's call.  I just used
a 100 foot wire antenna, worked fine, but at the low 
end of the tuning range, also seemed to pick up the 
high notes from nearby Hi-Fi's playing.
I'm sure I NEVER would have learned the CW character
for "/" if I'd not built that receiver.  All the Navy signals
I heard from NAA, NSS etc. were CW at about 20 wpm -
super good CW practice, hence the QST article.  I had a
QSL from NPM Hawaii thanking me for my useful 
reception report. "Useful",  uh-huh.  Why did I ever
throw all that stuff out, in one of the irrational cultural
purges?
Years later I bought at a GTE auction some Frequency
Selective Voltmeters. GTE had these swell auctions
in Everett WA. I thought it was neat how the meter
pegged when you tuned around 25 kHz. The station
of course went to RTTY and CW went away.  In the
mid-1970s I also noticed that on phone calls from
Seattle to the Olympic Peninsula, Forks and towns
like that, you could hear in the background what
sounded just like TTY. Also in the early 1990s 
when I drove to work on night shift ( would not
do that mistake again ) from Woodinville WA,
listening to an AM station on one particular
frequency, at a certain low area in the road,
ONLY there, the radio station strength would go
way down and I would hear the same teletype
sounding buzz on the car radio. I always wondered
if these phenomena were somehow from picking
up NPG, Jim Creek.
BTW, PSARA ( Puget Sound Antique Radio Society )
has in its museum at the Ronald School in North
Seattle, a scale model of the Jim Creek station
someone built.
Arlington WA now has a pretty big Naval
activity there. There just wasn't enuff room
at Everett WA for the ship base and all the
auxiliary facilities, so at Arlington  about 20
minutes away is the Commissary, BX, and so on.  
Arlington is all real flat farm type land, the 
station must be out in the hills around it.
Place seems to be growing at a pretty good
clip. Looked to me like a decent place to live,
so it's on my list. Of course, on a grey Pacific
Northwest rainy day, or should I say week or
month, it can look pretty doggone bleak.
-Hue Miller 
real flat farm type land,