Earle Smith Photo

The first military authorized ham station at Alert. DOT allowed me to use my callsign VE8AT from my Whitehorse location. (The callsign, incidentally, now is broadcast 24/7 from an amateur radio HF beacon installed at Eureka, courtesy of a benefactor at CAF HQ.)

All of the signs and diagrams behind me were courtesy of Lynn Tennant and some of the other ops. Behind the brown paper panel upon which resides the circumpolar map you would find, if you looked, uncounted dozens of bottles of beer. Whenever the guys would come down with messages for me to send, or run phone patches for them, they'd usually bring a few bottles of beer from the mess, just to provide a bit of liquid refreshment. God only knows how many undrunk bottles there were there when I left - I could never have made even a reasonable dent in them.

The equipment? Well, when we were ready to ship out of Glo to Alert the RCAF (read CBNRC, actually) would not allow me to bring my own radio equipment North with me - ham station operation was refused. That got changed when Air Commodore Carpenter (I think it was), the Air Officer Commanding Air Transport Command dropped in for a visit. A bunch of the ops got together with him for a heart-to-heart, complained about the high cost of beer and also about the fact they had no ham station to communicate with families. Before Carpenter left there I had permission to operate! And the price of beer was dropped to a few cents a bottle - good man he was!

Getting back to the equipment - the Viking II Ranger TX to the left was loaned to me by Marcel VE8NS, one of the Weather Station observers. The Vibroplex key in front of it was my own personal one which I picked up from a USAF Com type in Goose Bay in 54 and which I still regularly use in my present day ham station going on 50 years later. Then there's the RCA AR-88LF receiver and there's also a SP600 out of sight to the right. On top of the AR-88 is the remote control for the An/FRT-501 TX.

Antennas? Besides the homebrew two element ZL-Special I had an insulated Beverage laying on the ground - it was a few miles long and worked great so long as the wind wasn't blowing snow across it. Think it was around one or two miles long. And I also had an unlimited number of antennas to use provided they weren't in use for something else! Amateur radio paradise!

The guys up there were really a great team. Sometimes conditions would be great for phone patching when I was on shift. So, if one of the team wanted to get a phone patch home he'd find a relief for my operating position and I'd go do the patch, or traffic, or whatever.