"Roger Long" wrote in
:

I don't normally get excited by antennas but motoring up to this array
as the turn around point of our trip gave me the feeling you get when
you look at one of the biggest and most impressive of anything. 26
1000 foot tall towers all interconnected with the most fantastic web
of wires and bed spring like arrangements you can imagine. It
transmits at 25 Mhz to tell our nuke subs which cities to vaporize.
If there is a war, presumably a nuke will go off just above it within
one or two milliseconds of the ones that go off over Washington DC.
Strange to think that this wild and remote spot is Ground 0.1.

http://home.maine.rr.com/rlma/Cutler.jpg

We motored right up to the dock where the sign says, "Do not approach
within 300 feet." With typical government common sense, the type size
is such that the sign can't be read until you are within 100 feet. No
signs of security or any human presence except for a single van parked
next to the administration building. There is a building with about a
dozen very large diesel engine exhausts sticking out of the roof so I
imagine this sucker pumps out some real power.

There is something in the cruising guide about the transmissions from
this facility also being a prime means of measuring sunspot or solar
activity due to their effect on the ionosphere.

You can see the layout on Google Earth right at the end of our trip.
They don't bother to hide the towers on the chart, unlike the more
impressive structure that used to be in Prospect Harbor. In the
curious blank spot on the chart used to be a circle of towers about a
mile in diameter and nearly as tall as these. Around the top of the
towers ran a flat coil of huge diameter cable. The strands were maybe
a foot in diameter and the entire coil was wider than a highway. I
don't know when this was dismantled but I think it was still there
when I went through in the mid 80's. No sign of the remains or tower
foundations visible on Google Earth that I can see.


Yes, that's NSS. They are one of the major Navy comm centers and
certainly ground zero for several countries' missiles.

How's it feel to be irradiated by one of the most powerful VLF
transmitters on the planet?....(c

I've talked to NSS on HF from our ship in the Med using WW2 AM
transmitters back in the 1960s.

Our ship was GD.