IH-526-ODG "Party Jacket Tour"
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The first leg of the journey takes place in Mildenhall, England…
The towns' signage (pictured below) should let you know, there ain't much going on here, aside from the ducks and old folks... Because aside from the US Air Force bases, that's all that's out here... I literally live next to 4 retirement communities, lol!
Day1 consisted of taking the jacket to the Quick Stich shop in town, and getting some awesome liberty cuffs added on, courtesy of @Alex. I had already bought some from @Joule with plans to use them for the jacket, but the awesome King Neptune ones are just so badass and perfect! The color match is great!!!
While in town, we decided to grab a few malted beverages, for our evening walk by the river, pictured next.
And….
The fit pics...
Cuffs down:
Party-mode:
BONUS pic:
The side pockets make a nice inside pocket, perfect for hiding your dranks whilst walking through the old folks village, lol!
Peek-a-booze!!!!!
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Yeah, we have a heatwave coming through for the next couple of weeks, and I hear it will top out at 33C… Mind you, on Saturday when I took the pics, I was wearing a jacket because it was cool and breezy. I'll likely be doing some hand-carrying for the rest of my leg, unless we head out to the pub in the evening...
I guess it's time to get creative, lol
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That's a new one – never seen an 'elderly people' sign before
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Sweet patches. God damn!
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Is that Ariel’s dad on the cuffs?
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Well, with the UK in it's currently "summertime", and it's too warm to comfortably wear the jacket during daylight hours, so I decided that today would be "Take your jacket to work" day…
I'm sure some of you have seen a few fit pics from me with this view, but I'll give a little bit of an explanation of what it is that I do for a living.
"RF Communications/Datalinks Systems Engineer"
Basically, I am the local unit's 'subject matter expert' on engineering, installing, training and maintaining military radio communications. Whether it be point-to-point via UHF/VHF line of sight systems, SATCOM (satellite communications), HF, or microwave systems, I'm the go-to guy for our ground-air and ground-ground long haul, secured communications. Another part to it is the ability to provide "radio over IP"... Basically, there's a server rack full of radios in my office, and they're connected to a radio server/gateway and a switch, which makes them able to be broadcast across our network, so that commanders can have "command and control" capabilities of their aircraft from their workstation, rather than having to go to the air operations control center.
If all of that techno jargon wasn't painful enough, here's an Army recruitment video talking about the basic premise of what I do, minus the gun and cool uniform lol!
Day to day, it's fairly mundane, especially considering that I don't deploy like I used to in Okinawa... Military radios are VERY robust and rarely break, so I basically come in to work, send a few test messages/emails, make a few voice calls to ensure everything is working, and then I'm waiting 8hrs for stuff to break, which as I stated earlier, rarely happens. But, when it does..... Of course it's at the worst possible moment, i.e. at 2am while a plane is flying to Croatia for a training mission, and we lose comms for 2hrs. Obviously that's not ok, so because of that, I'm on 24/7 recall status, unless I'm on vacation.
Ok, enough nerd shit! Here's my pic of the party jacket with my helical SATCOM antenna farm on the roof of my work building.
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Very interesting to read that. God, my job is so dull in comparison.
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The home station/in-office portion of it is really, REALLY mundane… The unit here in England chooses to utilize me in a way that is very different than the unit in Okinawa did... There, they prefer to have me here at unit headquarters, handling all of the back-end, behind the scene tasks, where as in Okinawa, I was on the road doing training missions and 'deployments'.
I was actually one of the first 2 people on ground for the emergency humanitarian relief efforts for Typhoon Haiyan (Super Typhoon Yolanda) that devastated the Philippines in November 2013.
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Official handover at Fish n Chips 2018 [emoji16]
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