In January, 1966, I moved to a new job with ITT-Federal Electric Corporation, to work on the Air Force Vandenberg support contract. I was assigned to the Range Ships division and worked in radio communications centers on missile tracking ships. These ships were converted WWII Victory ships. They carried full instrumentation equipment to track and record flight events for various military missile and NASA manned spacecraft. The ship I was on the longest was the USNS Range Tracker, T-AGM-1. The Tracker was converted in Pasacoula, Mississippi, in 1959 and served Vandenberg through 1970. It was scrapped in the early 70's. We had done our job well. We eventually tracked satellites that replaced our ships!

Our HF installation was mind-boggling for that time. We used solid state Collins remote controlled transmitters and receivers. The transmitters were 208U-10's, which were capable of 20KW P.E.P. output. We employed AFSK and SSB. Our TX antennas were a rotatable log periodic antenna for 6-30 Mhz and a conical monopole for 2-30 Mhz. We also had a couple of transmit verticals. All of our receive antennas were 35-ft fiberglass marine verticals.

We used a Collins KWM2A and 30L-1 amp for hamming and were connected to the transmit antenna switching matrix, so we put out a pretty good signal. I, along with other hams, worked a lot of /MM. We visited most of the U.S. islands and operated from KX6, KM6, KG6, etc. We visited Tom Christian, VR6TC, at Pitcairn in 1969, while on board the USNS Watertown.

Dave, W6HUQ (now K7JJ. Tom Christian, VR6TC. John Steffan, K6???

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Most of my personal W6HUQ operation was from the ship. I upgraded to Advanced class in the Los Angeles FCC office in 1968.

It was a great job for me, but I was away from Sue and the 4 kids too much.

In January 1970, I resigned from this job and took on a new job in American Samoa, where I became licensed as KS6DY.

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Page created: 24 Feb 1998. Updated April 2007.