I served at Site 046 from about late 1969 to Feb 1971.

Technically it was a challenge. The tropospheric scatter shot north to Feldberg, Germany, we called it Schwarzwald, was a knife edge diffraction shot off of some mountain in Switzerland. The shot south to Coltano was, as I remember, actually bounced off the surface of the Med. Sea to the receiving antennas at Coltano.

The system was inherently unstable. There were actually 4 receivers and transmitters, two vertical and two horizontal, I spent countless hours trying to synchronize the receivers so that data passing through was not garbled. It was kind of like throwing tennis balls at a surface trying to bounce the balls into the baskets (antennas) at Coltano and Schwarzwald. Unfortunately, the surface we were throwing at was undulating and the bounces tended to go anywhere other than in the baskets at Coltano.

The shot north to Feldberg (Schwarzwald) was pretty unstable also depending upon atmospheric conditions. We had good days for reception and transmission and then we had terrible days when the data being carried was severely garbled. We would get nastygrams from far up the chain of command inquiring what was the problem?

When I arrived at Site 046 there was MUX gear that broke the signal down but it was removed shortly after I arrived and 046 became essentially a repeater station. I can remember that an ITT representative was sent to the site to determine what “Our “ problem was. He was there about a week to 10 days and was more than ready to get back to civilization. The guy was driving us all crazy. I finally told him we had a receiving crystal oscillator in a transmit crystal oscillator slot or visa versa . He grab onto that and wrote up the problem as solved and was gone the next day. We gave him one hell of a rough ride in the Snow Cat down below snow line.

Site 046 was good duty because nobody bothered you with the typical military BS. There was a master sergeant who ran the place and as long as you showed up for your shift and the communications flowed as well as could be expected under the inherent problems with the system he did not hassle you.

Winters could be hard because we were often confined to the Site for weeks at a time. We ran short on fresh food several times because we could not get down below snow line, even with the Sno Cat, to get fresh supplies from Camp Darby or the town market at Finale Ligure .

I can not remember the unit designation other than the Strategic Communications Command, Signal Group Med. There was a headquarters company at Camp Darby but I can not remember its designation.