IH-526-ODG "Party Jacket Tour"
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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]
Sent from my CLT-L09 using Tapatalk
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On our way back from Fish and chips we stopped off at a lovely pub by a stream; The Prince Leopold Inn in Upton Lovell. It was so damn hot today that a dip in the stream seamed the only sensible thing to do
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After a weekend of great company, gorgeous food and plenty to drink, at Fish'n'Chip's, it was back to marathon training. Me and Jules headed down to Colliers Way which is a cycling and walking path between Dundas Aqueduct, Radstock and Frome that makes use of a disused railway line and quiet country lanes through picturesque Somerset countryside. I didn't run in the jacket
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I didn't run in the jacket
Well you did a bit… [emoji1]
Lovely pics and info. I do miss the English countryside sometimes.
