How to take a NATO Radar station off the air, without really trying.

 

Back in 1962, as a newly trained electronics technician, I was posted to a Radar station in the Norwegian arctic to look after radar transmitters and receivers and signal processing equipment.

The station was part of a chain of similar installations providing radar coverage of the boundaries of the Soviet Empire of the day, from well north of Norway to Turkey in the south.

The idea was to be able to intercept Soviet aircraft intruding into NATO air space and monitor all air traffic as well.

For science fiction buffs, the station would have been a marvel to behold: A zig zagging road, going up the side of a steep mountain and disappearing into a hole in the mountain side part of the way up.

Going into the tunnel, a huge cavity opened up, containing a large concrete building.

Inside that building things got even weirder: Several levels and one large room like a cinema with a big screen in front and multiple radar screens with rotating beams and an operator at each one.

A crew of plotters worked behind the big screen, manually moving images of aircraft being tracked across the screen.

Almost one thousand meters above this bunker, on top of the mountain, were multiple radar transmitters and receivers, with huge rotating antennas emitting radar impulses of some 5 million watts each, reaching into space for the bodies of any aircraft, and being reflected back, to end up as an echo on the radar screens.

And, between the bunker inside the mountain and the top of the mountain was a railway tunnel, ascending at an angle of about 45 degrees for 1,5 kilometers with a rail car pulled by a cable.

The station was operating 24/7/365 with several shift crews alternating. It was a big operation with a military camp in the valley below the mountain housing all operational personnel.

As a rookie technician, one of my early duties was to change out an oscilloscope mounted in one of the signal processing racks in the bunker. It was plugged into a power socket, behind the scope, inside the rack.

So I had to feel my way, while stabilizing the replacement scope in one hand and the power plug in the other, to plug it in.

That when shit happened: I found myself having suddenly moved two feet across the aisle between signal processing racks with a rather blurry view of reality.

As I came to my senses, reports came in that the whole radar station had gone off the air all of a sudden.

It didn’t take too long to figure out what had happened: I had blown the breaker in the instrument rack containing the oscilloscope, which rack contained the master oscillators for all the equipment in the station.

For want of timing pulses, the transmitters on top of the mountain powered down automatically and the place just went dead.

This was immediately reported to NATO headquarters in Paris, France, so as prevent them from assuming that an air attack had happened during those volatile days of the cold war.

As for me? Nothing was ever said about the incident. They probably figured that I had learnt my lesson.