Looking at these ancient photos now, I can see why I often got “written up” after room inspections. My bed, not shown here, was a crawl-in cave behind the workbench, and I had a cat living with me. The tall equipment rack was a homebrew HF transmitter with a pair of Eimac 100TH tubes in…

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I had an oddly contentious relationship with my superiors in the Air Force, long ago, when I was 19 and obsessively building a lab into my dorm room. In the middle of all that, a friend bought a new motorcycle and invited me to go for a ride… an adventure that led to a broken…

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1972 was a strange year for me… as a geeky 19-year-old college dropout in the Air Force, I was hardly on the sort of career path that I had imagined. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and I was stationed in Mountain Home AFB, Idaho… doing avionics maintenance for the F-111 fighter aircraft. Of…

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by Steven K. Roberts Lackland AFB — May, 1971 (written in 2019) My odd decision to join the Air Force set an inevitable chain of events in motion, beginning with Basic Training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. The date of this post is the beginning of this epoch in my life. Given that this…

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In 1971, I made a strange decision… after about a year of being on my own, working as a deckhand on barges and then installing Autovon central-office phone systems on Army bases, I thought I’d join the Air Force as a way to get a degree (since I had cut the cord by dropping out…

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