Yes, I am the nut who thinks my 80 Trans AM is a good snow car, posi, V8 Turbo power and good tires and it was a ball!! Now I go for my 94 Fleetwood, but the ultimate is my 99 K2500 454 Burb.... G80 locker and all....

The Ranger is 2WD. Lock-Rite is made by Powertrax. It works fine on glare ice or hard packed snow, you just have to know how to pedal the throttle. It's just like driving a stock car on a flat track; you have to let it roll through the corners and get on the throttle at the exit. The Army hasn't had radar sites in Alaska since Nike days. They were decomissioned in the 1970's. They're all Air Force. Most of those have been decomissioned as well.

They are the Firefinder radars, AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37. They are still there.... Not long range, they are artillery tracking.

Ah so! The old counter battery trackers. Still used for Cope Thunder exercises.

How far north is that unit? I am curious just where I would have ended up.

Got any picts from the area?

I have been watching the show Deadiest Catch on Discovery and rather enjoy the glimpses of the Bering Sea. Talk about a brutal job, but the pay is good for the 2 weeks of torture....

We often camped out on old Nike/Hercules sites in Germany and other places, and even got a hold of the old Nike/Hercules power generators to give us 115v@400 Hz for the radars so we could save on running our 60KW 400 Hz Precise generators (8 gallons of diesel per hour....).

I miss working on the big radars, they were a blast.... most people can't imagine the enormous power out from them. They would fry you at close range, at 157m, they still had power levels of >10mW per cm^3. That is power boys and girls.... And 5000+ antennas that direct it.... Ahh things I did in my old Army life...

I think they're south of Fairbanks on the Donnelly Range. -50F would be pretty ordinary. Cope Thunder is all over the northern part of the state. I worked on navy missile fire control CW radar where you could be in the beam for no more than 2 seconds out of every 30 second period if you were at least 1100 feet away. We could track a seagull and take him right out of the sky. I preferred precision tracking radar to surveilence.