Comments by "Peter S" (@Peter_S_) on "Classic Bullseye - The US Navy's Ears On The World" video.

  1. I vividly recall driving up to the guard shack about 850 m from inner reflector of the NSGA Skaggs Island antenna in the late 1970s where my father who was a Navy vet and a ham asked the guard of the antenna's purpose. The guard replied that he thought "it was some sort of nuclear thing". The family turned around and continued to our picnic and the answer was dismissed as silly, but later I learned the site was to be repurposed in the early 1970s for a phased array RADAR to guard the San Francisco area with Zeus and/or related missiles at remote launchers. An arms treaty which limited the number of interceptor warheads caused plans to shrink to just the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in North Dakota so the answer was less silly than thought. I drove up to the same spot in 2014 but there was a locked gate and later that year the whole access road was blocked. Side note: the first station to receive Sputnik 1 in America was the Press Wireless, Inc station roughly 5.7 km North-East of the Skaggs antenna. That station continued to track later Sputniks for the Hearst Newspaper chain.
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  2. Coastal defence on the water is the purview of surprisingly, the Coast Guard. The Army handles the land portion. The area of the AN/FRD-10 I grew up near was also served by multiple Coast Guard radio stations. A Coast Guard member at one of those radio stations did the gardening which resulted in the 420 counterculture number.
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