Former DYE-1 DEW Line Radar Site

 Cold War 1947-1991, telecommunication, closed / former military, mobile phone transmitter / mast, early warning radar

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Call sign: Red River

Built in the late 1950's on a 162-acre site situated atop a mountain near the Inuit village of Qaqqatoqaq, the DYE-1 site was the Easternmost of four long-range radar sites built on Greenland as part of the DYE Sector of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. Placed into operation in 1961 and manned by 20 crew on a year-round basis, the site was responsible for monitoring a piece of airspace over Western Greenland from the DYE-2 Ice Cap site 180 miles East to the DYE-MAIN site located on Cape Dyer, Baffin Island 233 miles West.

One of the few DEW Line sites not built with its own airstrip to support its resupply and personnel movements, DYE-1's proximity to the nearby Søndre Strømfjord airport permitted the majority of small parcel and personnel movements to be carried out by helicopter to a small pad on the South side of the mountaintop installation. Larger items and the yearly resupply of fuel and provisions were brought ashore at a beaching area on the Itidadlak Fjord throughout the Summer months and all material was brought to the site by means of a 19-mile gravel road.

Remaining operational through 1988, DYE-1 joined DYE-2 and DYE-3 in being shut down at the end of the Summer season, its early warning role largely assumed by radar sites at Thule Air Base and its troposcatter communication role assumed by satellites. Remaining in an idle caretaker status through the end of the Cold War, the station was demolished and the site environmentally remediated by 1995 and the land returned to the Danish Government. Today, no trace of the DEW Line site remain with the exception of a few outbuildings now utilized as a transmission site for both Tele Greenland & Naviair communications to and from Canada.

lswilson.dewlineadventures.com/dye1pics.htm