[TowerTalk] Large Navy Antenna Farm in N. California

[Craig McCartney]

Mark,

What you saw are two different HF transmit sites and a separate housing
facility.  To wit:

- The Northern-most site is the former Voice of America Dixon Relay Station.
It occupies one section, 640 acres of land.  There are two dipole curtain
arrays, suspended between 340 foot towers.  One is aimed across Hawaii
toward VK land for Pacific coverage and the other on the great circle toward
China for coverage of Asia.  The site also contains numerous rhombics on
various bearings.  All antennas are fed with 300-ohm open wire line, capable
of 250 KW, AM which was the output level of the three Collins transmitters
used by VOA.  Our company, Globe Wireless now owns the site.  We provide HF
maritime email services.  Space at this site is also subleased to ARINC;
they transmit HF voice and data to commercial aircraft from there.

- Directly adjacent to the south and west is three-quarters of a section,
960 acre, transmit site.  Although is started as a Navy site, call sign NPG,
it is now used by all branches of the military (and probably other gov't
agencies).  The most notable feature is the ELF vertical antenna on either
70 kHz or 15 kHz, I don't recall which.  The rest of the land is covered by
a large number of wideband conical antennas for frequency agility and a
number of towers with rotatable LPA arrays.  Last time I visited, about 5
years ago, the building housed a bunch of Harris 10 KW transmitters -
probably something like 3 rows of twelve - plus one high power ELF
transmitter.  This site uses buried coax exclusively.

- I don't know much about the housing site you saw.  It is directly west of
the former VOA site and is now abandoned.

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-towertalk@contesting.com
[mailto:owner-towertalk@contesting.com]On Behalf Of Mark Fancher
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 8:57 PM
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: [TowerTalk] Large Navy Antenna Farm in N. California



A few years ago, I was stationed at Travis AFB, CA near Sacramento.  One
day, I was taking a ride through the countryside when I came across a huge -
I mean huge antenna farm.  It had all kinds of very tall towers, shorter
towers and curtain arrays.  It was a ham's fantasy come true!

I remember it was a Navy installation, but it didn't seem to be active
anymore.  In fact, from what I recall, the base housing looked like it had
been converted into county government housing for poor immigrant workers.

This installation was about 10-20 miles north of Vacaville.

Does anyone know what this base was used for, and is it still used by remote
control?

Maybe someone on Tower Talk was actually stationed there?

Mark Fancher, WO9G
mmfancher@earthlink.net



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