Pedro Dome WACS Site

 military, demolished, tropospheric scatter station

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Established in 1958 as a dual tropospheric and microwave communications relay site in the White Alice Communications System (WACS) , the Pedro Dome site (Callsign PJD) provided links for five sites in the United States Air Force telecommunication network. For its tropospheric scatter shots to Bear Creek to the West and Fort Yukon to the Northeast, the station was equipped with two pairs of 60ft antennas with 10KW of transmission power to complete the respective 124 and 130 mile shots.

For its line-of-sight, short range communication shots, Pedro Dome was also equipped with a microwave communications tower to handle traffic between the Murphy Dome Air Force Station site 25 miles East and Eielson Air Force Base 27 miles to the Southeast. Its final microwave communications link was installed as part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), and featured a pair of 30ft round parabolic dishes with 1kW of transmission power and linked the station to the relay site at Donnelly Dome 99 miles South, which aligned the shot to pass through the Black Rapids Pass to the Glenallen WACS site a further 116 miles South.

Operating throughout the lifespan of the WACS, the manned mission at Pedro Dome ended in the mid-1970's when its facilities were turned over to AT&T Alascom. With the termination of the WACS network leaving the station obsolete, Alascom utilized the site to house support infrastructure for the still-operational microwave transmission tower for a time, though the present-day tower is no longer co-located with the WACS station. After remaining idle for the better part of 20 years, the site was razed and environmentally remediated in the late 1990's.

www.whitealice.net
www.kadiak.org/wacs/wacs.html
Site Photo: www.oocities.org/heartland/shores/7989/wacs/pjd.jpg