Welcome to Nomehenge, Home to Alaska’s Soviet-Era Antennas | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Nomehenge, Home to Alaska’s Soviet-Era Antennas

atlasobscura.com

49 pointsfortran7716 comments

tropo scatter antenna systems for point-to-point over the horizon data links still exist, and are not as absolutely gigantic (but are still huge and unwieldy compared to portable two way satellite):

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/140...

https://www.mwrf.com/technologies/systems/article/21846099/t...

You still need REALLY high power amplifiers on the Tx on each end (not too much different from a giant high power tx amp on like a 7.3 meter two-way geostationary satellite earth station). The modems are a lot better than they used to be. Better use of advanced FEC and adaptive coding/modulation systems, very similar also to advanced two way SCPC/MCPC type two way satellite modems. Some of the same manufacturers make subsystems for both industry segments.

One of the reasons why the US DoD is so enthusiastic about Starlink (and when available, LEO systems from telesat, oneweb, etc) is that future polar orbit coverage will provide a huge amount of bandwidth to sites at very high latitudes where using geostationary-based systems is problematic due to elevation angles.

some links for historical stuff related to data/comms for radar sites in alaska and northern canada:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Early_Warning_Line

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Warning_System

I think one of the main reasons why they are so enthusiastic about it is that the cost of these satellites is low enough that there are so many of them that taking them out is much harder than with even the most hardened military satellites of which there will never be significant numbers. If the cost of the munition outweighs the cost of the satellite then your satellite network is pretty safe.

That is a good point, and generally they want as many paths/redundancies as possible. The DoD has its own molniya orbit satellites, quite recently launched, but capacity is limited.

A very active tropo scatter system still in use today is the SNOTEL network, which are snow level and precipitation sensors spread all throughout very remote and mountainous terrain in the Western US and Canada.

They operate on 40.67 MHz are still actively in operation today.

https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snow/

I imagine the information needed for small integer data from a sensor of rainfall mm/hour and snow gauge, etc is a very low data rate... What channel widths and modulations are they using in the 40MHz bands?

Snotel is a 9 khz channel bandwidth, BPSK data at 4000 bits per second

See also the FLR-9 "Elephant Cage" antenna arrays used for direction finding during the cold war.

https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/518691/iconi...

https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/an-flr-9.htm

It's interesting to think about how one generation's tech becomes the next one's landscape, the next one's heritage, the next one's cultural horizons.

Picture this: 25 years after we no longer need to maintain huge data centers, after that infrastructure has become obsolete (let's suppose it will), there will start to be tourism. "Hey come look at this gigantic facility, now falling into ruins, that an obsolete corporation called Google once kept so secure."

I had one of those odd realisations a few years ago when hiking in the UK. A large swathe of this outdoor "natural" beauty is actually remenants of industry: All these dry-stone walls, landscaping and hedges everywhere are not natural at all, though as they've been there for centuries (in some cases), they're very much part of the landscape.

I do wonder what it takes to stop thinking of something as industrial mess and instead as natural.

Title kind of implies Alaska was part of the USSR...

Yeah, the title uses the adjective incorrectly. It should be “… Alaska’s Cold-War era …l

-Well, it had, after all, been bought from the predecessors of the USSR less than a century earlier...

Yes, I thought my knowledge of US history was worse than I imagined. “Cold War Era” would have been better.

It technically was?

Technically, it wasn't.

Alaska was purchased by the US in 1867 from the Russian Empire [0]. The USSR didn't exist until 1922[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

We were told in history class it was a 100 year rent, which technically would mean it belonged to USSR upon it creation, but it seems to be a myth

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