[R-390] Radio Facility, R390 in use

[Jim Haynes]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Flowertime01 at wmconnect.com wrote:

> As the site is likely a transmitter receiver site,

How common is it to have a combined transmitter-receiver site.  I thought
wherever possible they separated the two so the transmitters did not
desensitize the receivers.  (Of course the Navy on a ship doesn't have
that option.)

> Plowed fields around antenna sites is still common practice. There was no
> reason to pay rent on that much space for no return. The owners are allowed to
> raise crops.

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the ground around the site looks
like gravel to me, not being used to grow crops.
>
> Still no clues as to the location of the site.
>
I wonder if we ought to post this to something like the armyradios
group on Yahoo, to get more readers, one of whom might be able to
identify the site.

I suppose if there were crypto gear at the site it might be considered
too sensitive to photograph.  But seems more likely that encryption would
be done at the message center and this site merely sends and receives
what it gets.  Considering the time period, I wonder if they might still
have been using offline encryption.  I can remember in the late 1950s,
just tuning around the HF bands and picking up random RTTY, there
were often messages with headers in the clear and then the text
encrypted.