Message posted by Gary Sellani on September 04, 2000 at 13:50:56 EST:
Well I'm a bit confused (or more confused than usual). You can't have the same identifier for different VORs, i.e. there should only be one MCY, and that is the Desert Rock airstrip in Mercury. I don't know about VORs on UHF, since the "V" stand for VHF. If this is the case, maybe the Base Camp VOR is on UHF. My point is when you were on Tikaboo and heard MCY, it was probably from Mercury. This means there is yet another VOR freq for the Groom Lake airstrip, which is good because that means there is something else out there to discover. I did a check on a local (to me) military airfield (Moffet, which is NUQ). If you look it up on www.airnav.com, it doesn't have a VOR. The military also uses TACAN's, but I don't know if TACANs are at airfields. The only one I've ever seen is on a mountain (MT. Tamalpias in the bay area. I have a photo of it at http://www.lazygranch.com/images/aug2000/tacan.jpg Here is a suggestion. The next time someone is on Tikaboo and listenting to the MCY VOR, do some very simple direction finding. One would be to hold your scanner sideways. Then the antenna is directional, with the direction of the signal being perpendicular to the antenna. If it points to Groom, then you have something. Note that your body being behind the scanner helps to make this setup unidirectional. You can tune to the 3rd harmonic of the VOR, which often makes the setup more sensitive because the signal is weaker, which means you are less likely to hear a reflection. [A search on DF and radio will get you lots of info on transmitter hunting.] A VOR itself tends to be pretty weak, so this 3rd harmonic trick may not work.
for those who have never seen a Tacan) I've never been to the Moffet airshows, so I don't know what navaids they have, but I'm going to ask around.
In Reply to: Re: Basecamp VOR posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on September 04, 2000 at 04:11:44 EST:
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