The sense of sadness I have over this picture is palpable. This is the dorm where I lived while stationed at the 786th Radar Squadron, Minot Air Force Station, North Dakota. I risked my life, literally, on this day to get to my room which was on the second floor. The face of the building you are seeing faces south. My room was the last three windows on the second floor on the north side of the building in the north west corner. At that end of the building, the floor had rotted through and I could see down to the first floor. See the antenna tripod on the roof? That actually belongs to me. I mounted it up there in January of 1978 at 0°F with a -10°F windchill, and then installed a HyGain Penetrator CB antenna on it; I couldn't believe they let me do it, but honestly I don't think they had a clue what I was proposing. Still, they didn't say a word once it went up. Picture in a moment. I could talk to anyone with a CB for as far as the eye could see. My view was the spectacular and unobstructed expanse of the North Dakota plains. I was a member of the site fire team, and the projectionist for our little makeshift movie theater. When officially on duty, I was a part of the team that maintained the most bad-ass early warning search radar system in all of North Dakota, and only a handful of them in the world. It was one of the coolest things I've ever done in my life and something that gives me incredible pride.
Now the entire site is in such complete decay that I just want to cry. You can go home, but you can never go home. This will be the topic of an upcoming video.
Back in the day. For me, that was 1977 - 1979. The site operated with many other radar systems from April 1953 - July 1979. I left in September 1979.
The mighty AN/FPS-27A Aircraft Control and Early Warning Search Radar (4 stories) and its companion AN/FPS-26A Heigh Finder radar (2 stories).
The Tranquility Base CB base station antenna, a HyGain Penetrator omni-directional 22' mast with four 9' radials.
Steampunk. The site was heated by massive steam boilers and there were above-ground steam lines running everywhere. A curious juxtaposition of old school steampunk and the once state of the art cold war early warning AN/FPS-27A tech.
All that remains of the once-mighty AN/FPS-27A (Verizon operates the new cell tower west of the remains of the radar towers).