I was the Chief Operator at the station from the late 1960's until 1973 when I left the Navy.

The station actually belonged to Special Services at NAS Cecil Field rather than VA-174. I was officially attached to VA-174 and many of the station's operators came from there. I started as a volunteer and was later sent TAD to Special Services and assigned to the station full time. At one time Mike Hurley was also TAD to the station so we had two full time operators.

We used to handle a lot of traffic from Viet Nam during those years. We assisted a couple other Marine Corps stations (N0MCL and N0MCP as I recall) in picking up the traffic via RTTY from the west coast and distributing it throughout the 6th district during the evening hours. At N0NIU we had the advantage of having operators from VA-174 and several of the other squadrons assigned to stand their evening and week end watches at the MARS station in lieu of the typical military duty. That gave us coverage from 8AM until approximately 10PM seven days a week. We also used to run a lot of phone patches for Gitmo during those years.

The station started out in the special services building on the main part of the base. We used to run into problems with being put on "radio silence" during times when they were loading armament on the flight lines and so Ed Groff, the civilian special services officer, had a MARS building built for us at Lake Neuman. This was on the perimeter of the base away from the flight line so we no longer had to observe "radio silence". We had several utility poles installed for antenna supports and had a big "V" beam stretched over the lake. Having the building built custom for us meant we had lots of power with 220V available everywhere and a grounding ring around the building.

Just before I left active duty in 1973 I passed the Chief's exam and picked up ATC in the reserves. I remained active in MARS for a number of years and did several 2 week summer drills at NAV in Arlington, VA. Eventually the D.C. area commute prevented me from being home in time to meet the required local HF net and I had to drop out of MARS.

Robert W. Lewis  (Bob)

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