USCG OMSTA Hawaii

I was transferred from boot camp Cape May to OMSTA Hawaii as a Fireman January 1983. Very soon after arriving there I walked in to the transmitter room when the several ET’s the Chief (XO) and the Warrant (CO) were scrambling because smoke was in the air, alarms were going off and they couldn’t find the cause. I went in through a door that happened to face the vents on the end of one of the tall transmitters and I saw flames. I instinctively reached for a CO2 extinguisher that was very near and grounding it to the deck I put the horn against the transmitter vent and let it discharge. Everyone was stunned a minute and the CO seeing the ice residue immediately was worried I used dry chemical and thought it had damaged a lot of equipment. I explained simultaneously with several others that it was CO2 and he was then very grateful and thanked me. I thought it was pretty cool. I was a new fireman and put out a fire even though I expected it to be just a bottom level engineering billet.

Fire was in the end of one of these cabinets.

The other fireman, seaman and I mostly mowed grass, cut How bush, and Koa trees back from the road with machetes, and stood safety watches with an ET on overnight duty.
We gathered our chainsaw and machete limbs in a huge pile and each month we had a morale party burning. It was great fun and we were a 20 man station and a pretty tight bunch all the way up to the XO and CO.

One of our monthly burn parties.

We also shut down the omega station annually and climbed the huge helix coil, an electrical transmitting coil leading to the 6 valley span antenna’s. The insulated copper coils were flat and about 6 inches wide and maybe 12 inches apart and coiled up several stories in approximately a 20 foot diameter. We climbed the coils with buckets of alcohol and rags to wipe the dust from them. The coils would make anyone think of some huge devious electrical coil straight out of a Frankenstein movie. There were also six variometer rooms consisting of much smaller coils, maybe 3 feet by 4 feet that adjusted automatically similar to a rheostat or a variable transistor or transducer to vary a huge amount of voltage to the helix and up to the 6 valley span antennas. If I remember correctly, our electric bill was about $15000.00 a month! An electronics technician can please correct me if I’m wrong as these are my memories. Some of my technical statements may be inaccurate but I’m telling what I believe is true. This haikuvalley.com link shows how the helix looks like something out of a Frankenstein movie. Also it shows how the helix is positioned in the building and connects to the valley span anntenna’s.

Another interesting fact is if anyone held a standard fluorescent light bulb in their hand standing anywhere out side of the station, it would light up in pulses with the transmissions of each signal, about one every one or two seconds. Also, if you were bare footed or wet or grounded and touched anything metal including your car door handle you would receive a terrific shock! I was standing on a metal ladder tightening a nut on a sliding door on our storage building with leather gloves on using a ford wrench. The wrench slipped, hit me in the jaw while it was still contacting the metal nut and the shock nearly knocked me off the ladder!

One of the most fun things that happened when I was there was when Magnum PI came there to film an episode of their show. In fact, the opening of every Magnum PI show was filmed on the road belonging to the Coast Guard Omega station. I met Tom Selleck and his girlfriend that he married later and I got their autographs. I also got to speak to Tom as they were filming. They gave us all official Magnum PI hats, we got to eat with them at their own catered dinner, I got my picture taken with stunt props and stunt men, and even got paid by them to watch their equipment at night so they could go in to town.

Magnum PI set. CO with camera.

Tom Selleck & Jillie Mack

Me with Magnum PI stuntman and prop guns. Notice Selleck’s jeep behind me.

Tom Selleck getting out of his jeep.

We did an experiment for the electronic engineers by laying a copper ground plane radially starting at the main building and extending maybe a mile into the jungle like the spokes on a wheel in all directions. There must have been 20 of them radiating from the main building when we finished. The 6 valley span antennas which were I believe a quarter wave length of the very low frequency OMEGA signal were the longest in the world and the wave traveled a very long distance. The reason we laid the copper ground plane was to see if we could get an increase in distance the wave traveled. We carried coils of maybe 1/8 inch copper wire and soldered the 100 foot lengths together.
(I’m guessing on the lengths) We had to chop jungle and use our Kubota tractor to clear paths in the jungle for many days to lay the copper wire on top of the ground. At the ends we drove grounding rods in and clamped the wire to them. In one very large area we reached a patch of land several football fields in size that didn’t have one blade of vegetation on it. We were told that Agent Orange was sprayed on that area of the jungle for testing before it was used in Vietnam. It is astounding to be in such dense jungle and come to a huge patch of all dirt. It made it easy to lay the wires however and we all talked of how it would probably kill us some day since we were in an area of Agent Orange exposure. It was never entered in my service record and the VA records of Agent Orange testing I have found doesn’t include that area, but that is what our commanding officer told us. They also told us that the radiation that would light a fluorescent tube in your bare hand and shock the crap out of you if you touched any thing metal while you were grounded was harmless to humans. I’ve made it to 57 so maybe, maybe not. I have my doubts about the sincerity of our government at times and this is one of them.

Our Stairway to Heaven was the Star Attraction. Many people travel to Hawaii even today to climb the stairway sometimes vertically up the mountain 2900 feet, though I understand it is now private property and permission must be obtained from the owners. Interestingly, it was Coast Guard property when I was there and even though we let people sign in on weekends to climb the ladder people continued to make holes in our fence in the jungle to sneak up the ladder. We patched fence holes too. It was built in WW2 for the repeater dish that was on top the mountain to relay radio signals to submarines on either side of the mountain. We had the job of keeping the ladder in good repair and carried boxes of tools and pieces of railing and steps up that ladder to repair it at times when landslides damaged sections of it. Another interesting fact is the main building is still there and has walls six feet thick with railroad rails used from the local narrow gauge cane field railroad as reinforcement bars in the concrete. It was made to withstand a direct hit from a 500 pound bomb and a near miss from a 1000 pound bomb. Pretty cool.

Main building with six foot thick railroad rail reinforced concrete.

Me on liberty climbing stairway to heaven with friend (2900 feet sometimes vertical)

The OMEGA Station was my first CG duty station and it was not my most rewarding station but a great start to a great career and some of the most fun I have ever had in my life. Another thing anyone stationed in Hawaii knows is that they have no lack of friends who want to come and visit them from the mainland US and they do too!

Great Link to Omega Station History: http://haikuvalley.com