Dry dock: Coast Guard’s desert outpost still vital

Jace Radke

Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2002 | 11:09 a.m.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Jim Pulse has hunted Russian submarines in the Bering Strait, rescued stranded boats in the Atlantic Ocean and helped catch drug smugglers off the coast of Florida.

Two years ago the 18-year veteran was assigned about as far away from the ocean as an active guardsmen can get -- Searchlight.

"I never thought I'd be stationed out in the desert," Pulse said. "When I joined up I thought I'd always be on the coast and on ships, not out in the middle of nowhere.

"The only water I see is when it flash floods, or when I take my boat out on the lake."

Despite being hundreds of miles away from the Pacific Ocean, the station is crucial in providing safe passage for mariners and aviators across the globe.

The seven Guard members at the Nevada desert outpost use a mix of ingenuity and vintage machinery to ensure that a long-range radio navigation system, known as Loran, constantly transmits to ships and aircraft that use the system to pinpoint their location.

"When people come out here, they always wonder why we're not closer to Lake Mead," Pulse said. "People joke about why we put the station in the middle of nowhere, but it's actually right where it needs to be."

The placement of Loran stations in places like Searchlight, Boise City, Okla., and Gillette, Wyo., is designed to push the signal as far as possible, Pulse said.

"The signal bounces off land masses, and studies have been done to determine where the best spots are for radio frequency propagation," Pulse said, from the station, perched on the side of a mountain 10 miles south of Searchlight. "This location allows the signal to travel farther than other spots."

The station, built in 1976, broadcasts its 100 kilohertz signal by using four towers that jut up from the desert floor to a height of 700 feet.

The signal is a measure of time derived from three atomic clocks at the station. A pulse is generated, amplified by vacuum tubes and transmitted via the four radio towers.

Navigators use the signals from three different stations -- there are 24 in the country and more in Russia, Canada and Japan -- to determine longitude and latitude. The Searchlight signal reaches as far as Hawaii and the Caribbean.

A cement-block building houses the computer systems needed to generate the signal. The bulky machines evoke memories of the room-sized computers of a half-century ago, with vacuum tubes humming in place of more modern transistors or computer chips.

"It's sort of like walking back in time 20 or 30 years," said Chief Petty Officer Carl Yetman, who commands the station. "It's amazing to see these huge machines out here, and they still do the job they're meant to do."

Loran has been a proven navigation method for more than 50 years, but the federal government almost shut it down in 2000, Yetman said. With the advent of satellites and global positioning systems, Loran seemed to be going the way of the 8-track.

But the federal government "found out that too many people still use it, and they decided not to shut it down," Pulse said. "Besides navigators on ships and aircraft, we've had shipping companies tell us they still use it to find their truckers."

Loran is also used by telecommunications companies, which note the exact timing of the pulse when sending calls and information over phone lines.

It is still the standard for radio navigation, Federal Aviation Administration officials said.

"Loran is the old reliable," Pulse said. "It's accurate and it's a lot cheaper than GPS. I think both Loran and GPS are going to be with us for a while."

The Coast Guard is slowly replacing the older equipment at its Loran stations with new hardware that will likely end the need for manned supervision of the system, Pulse said.

Pulse estimates that change is still a few years away, and until then guardsmen will continue to deal with the problems that arise from the the isolated nature of the station.

"When something breaks out here, you have to get a replacement shipped in, and you never know how long that will take," Pulse said. "We have to keep enough vacuum tubes on hand to replace a full set of eight used in each of our two transmitters."

The water-cooled tubes require deionized water, which doesn't carry an electrical charge, but the crew has been forced to improvise when the station's supplier doesn't deliver.

"Lately we've been using the distilled water they sell at the supermarket, and that seems to work fine," Pulse said.

The remoteness of the station also takes a toll on the crew's quality of life.

The Coast Guard maintains housing in Boulder City for those working at the station, but, like all members of the military, the crew is on call 24 hours a day, Petty Officer Jill Riddle said.

"If something goes wrong in the middle of the night you have to get up and head out to the station," said Riddle, who has been reassigned to an even remoter post, a Loran station on St. Paul Island off the coast of Alaska. "The remoteness can make it hard. Sometimes you can't make it back to town to pick up your daughter from school."

The outpost's only neighbors are the cactus and the reptiles that the guardsmen have incorporated in the station's patch, Petty Officer David Brown said, noting the insignia with a rattlesnake circling a radio tower lit by two searchlights.

"You always have to keep an eye out for the snakes," said Brown, noting the crew found two rattlesnakes last year inside the station that had to be gently escorted out.

"I didn't know too much about this post when I was assigned here, but I was told about the snakes.""