I served in the Army twice. The first time was from 1972-75. I was in the 32nd Signal Battalion stationed at McNair Kaserne in Hoechst, Germany. I recently had the opportunity to see a modern communications rig. It is not much larger than a Humvee and they pull up, open the satellite dish and they're pretty much ready to go in less than 5 minutes. The following pictures show what we had to go through to set up in the 1970's. I envy them now !
First you had to find a clearing big enough to set up the antenna tower and guy wires for it. The antenna came in 5 foot sections that had to be assembled one piece at a time.
Once you had the base set up you had to attach the Horns (receivers) on top and hand crank each section up and then put the next section in underneath. That's me on top of the base getting ready to attach the Horn.
As we were usually a relay station we had to erect two antennas each time. It usually took any where from 2 -4 hours to get set up and ready for operations. Then you just had to hope that you didn't get the order to "jump" (tear down and move to another site and set up again) This happened frequently and you had 2 hours to tear down and move.
This last picture is of me standing in front of our generator rig that we had to tow everywhere. It had to be set up at least 50 yards from the rig and fed every 3-4 hours to keep it running and keep the systems up. We usually worked 8 hours on, 8 hours off.
