[SMCARA] K3NHK

[Sam Leach]

Tom,
This truly marks the passing of time.  I can remember when the base was
polluted with hams (enlisted, officers, and a flock of civilians) and the
quonset hut (W3PQT) was humming both day and night.
73 All
sl

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 5:01 PM Frederic Clarke <w4okw at md.metrocast.net>
wrote:

> Hi all (or Y'all, if you prefer!),
>
> Well, the antennas at W4OKW came down last weekend and the radios are
> packed up. So I guess we are really MODLOCing ( a Navy term meaning
> "modify location" used when moving a unit from one place to another) to
> Geechieville, AKA Charleston SC in early November. OT: Geechie is the
> dialect spoken by the Gullah natives in the low country, although some
> of the perpetually offended seem to think it is derisive.
>
> You may know that there has been a ham station on the NAS for years
> (originally W3PQT, then K3NAL). We used to be in a quonset hut behind
> the post office until a CO of NAS decided the hut and it's 100 foot
> cedar antenna pole were "ugly". That 100 foot pole was the home of the
> WR3ACP 13/73 and later the K3HKI 04/64 repeater. So along came the
> bulldozers and Bldg 1216 was gone. We were relocated to the HF
> transmitter site that is in the woods behind the museum. It is about a
> 15 minute trip on a pot hole infested dirt road (West Patrol Road), so
> attendance at our daily lunch meetings dwindled to me, mostly and Tony
> when he could break away. The site has 5 Rockwell-Collins 3KW HF
> transmitters and five 100 foot tall, conical monopole antennas. The base
> has not used the those transmitters in over 10 years,  so we had free
> access to a great antenna field! As you can imagine, when they fired up
> those 3KW Collins rigs, we couldn't hear much other than NHK-4! No, we
> never cheated an fired them up on the ham bands, although that would
> have been a hoot!
>
> Facing the inevitable, we have decided to close up shop and return our
> room to Ground Electronics (the building also houses the base UHF
> trunking system.). Pete and I have moved a lot of the gear out to the
> museum, as well as the cabinets and work benches. We will clean up the
> remaining items this week and relinguish the keys to GEM.
>
> All club equipment and most of the residual ex MARS gear has been moved
> into the cabinets in museum building C. This includes the Icom
> 725/735/751A/746 HF tranceivers and a Yaesu FT-747 and FT-8800. There
> are also a couple of Icom commercial VHF/UHF transceivers programmed for
> the local repeaters and simplex. These are FCC Part 90 Type Accepted
> radios so they could be used for GMRS (might be handy for the club Comm
> Trailer). The prize of this collection is an Icom 7300 transceiver that
> will be used in the soon to be renovated K3NHK club station. This radio
> came to us via a circuituous route from Navy MARS (SK), but is on no
> ones inventory, so it defaults to the museum. This is a great radio and
> we have been using it on FT-8 a lot. I will forward a copy of the
> annotated club inventory form to the club FYI.
>
> I hope to join WA4USN, USS Yorktown (CV-10) in Charleston and help
> activate the ship more frequently. We will be living in the downtown
> historic district, so I imagine between crushing EMI and antenna
> restrictions, I will be limited in my operations! There is always mobile
> I guess! I'll be listening for K3HKI 3A MD/DC next June!
>
> I will be turning over the keys to the repeater site in Hermanville to
> Pete, since a trip from CHS to the repeater is probably not in the
> cards! We could use a volunteer or two to help Pete as the repeater
> committee and control operators.  Also, as I am the trustee of the K3NHK
> license for the PRNAM club station, a voluteeer is needed there also.
> No big rush to make it happen, but on the "to do" list.
>
> 73 de W4OKW
>
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