[Spooks] History - 5 Digit Station in Fort Lauderdale, FL

[Tom Morris]

Boy I'd love to know what that HUGE facility adjacent to the antenna array
is/was. The conical antenna is visible in Google street view but no
identifying information about the site can be seen. I guess that was the
old AT&T facility?

A lot of the Havana Moon reports are subject to some... uh... not quite
scientific accuracy, notably the articles surrounding the Jupiter
Lighthouse site where there were never any good signs of any HF station...
but the big missile tracking dish for Cape Canaveral always stimulated the
imagination.

However, that being said, I did positively identify a station that was
reading 5 figure groups in Spanish in a V2a like format in fall of 2006
from a site directly north of Florida International University - across the
street from the Sweetwater police station! It was in a then abandoned strip
mall housing only one business, a small convenience store... with a wire
antenna suspended across the roof. No, it didn't look like the feedline
dropped into the convenience store. Would you care for some coded messages
with your bag of pork rinds? The funny part is, it was active all through
the investigation and the bust of Carlos and Elsa Alvarez, when Elsa worked
right across the street at FIU... no idea if it was related to their
specific operations though. I wonder who may have logged it around that
time - one distinguishing factor to it was, the damn thing had NO
consistency. The night I found it, it was on 9.310 AM. Other times it'd
been observed in the 40 or 80 meter ham bands, AM or sideband, and
sometimes as part of a Morse net. A friend of the family who lived nearby
would routinely go find it with his HF radio receiving off a 2 meter 1/4
wave vertical trying to figure it out. It continued operation for a few
months and then just ceased to be. The feedline appeared to descend into
about where the tattoo parlor is now.
https://www.google.com/maps/@25.7629245,-80.3725842,3a,60y,249.64h,85.06t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgClvuzJ8XlQJuBvwiJu1UA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

I've always wondered about the reports around Palm Beach county and if
maybe some of that activity actually was out west of the airport... that
area was (and still is) a pretty interesting patchwork of remote and hard
to reach places. I used to maintain a couple of FM broadcast transmitters
out that way and it was always an amusing maze to navigate to find them!
This area also used to have a lot of weird little airstrips on private
property and it wouldn't surprise me if the Columbian Cartel would sneak in
... shipments ... there, just like they used to with the runway off Card
Sound Road in the Florida Keys...

I think my favorite was the one located on the same site as WPTV... it was
a whole big complex of towers out there in the middle of nowhere, with one
housing a weather radar... I was told that this radar and its tower had
actually fallen over at some point in its history and been reconstructed.
The TV tower was located in a swampy area that would have been amazing for
AM broadcast use as the ground conductivity would have ruled - it was
pretty much constantly under mud, if not outright water. Watch out for
Broadcast Engineer Eating Mosquitoes.

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Tom Morris, KG4CYX
Chief Engineer, Results Radio of Redding
786-228-7087