Yours Truly!!

You gotta love a person who loves his work! Well, the honey bucket detail is one I didn't care for much! This is I as a buck ass Signalman in 1961 about a month before the end of my first tour in Alert.

Me again. This time, tour #7 in 1986. As the OpsC you get to do lots of neat things. This was the symbolic destruction of the Model 28 printers. That's a 10 pound sledge hammer!! I did a number on that sucker too! These machines had been the bain of many an operator. They were to me for at least 18 years. They were great when we first got them, but by 1986 they had more than outlived their usefullness.

Not long after arriving in Alert on my first tour, I was introduced to the wonderful world of ham radio. Of course we had all the modern conveniences as you can see by the Hammerlund SP600 receiver we were using!!

This is a better look at the SP600, also the VFO used to tune it and the ANFRT 501 transmitter partially obscured. The small box to the right of the SP600 is a Heathkit AM2 SWR meter. Our callsign at the time was VE8TU. Note the ice buildup on the window and the black outside. We were in our 24 hrs per day dark cycle. Great for sleeping anytime!!

Our first call card - VE8TU. A good number of the guys used this facility to talk to their loved ones down south when radio conditions were good. Since the audio portion was AM only, there were many times when one could not talk, but CW worked fine. When that happened the guys would hurriedly scribble out a message for the opr to xmit by flat key. It wasn't fancy, but was better than nothing, especially when the aircarft only came in every 6 weeks. It was a long stretch between mail days.