From Soldiers in the Jungles of Belize, Messages for the Folks Back Home To the radio operators at Base Camp Iceberg, Belize, duct tape was not the stuff of jokes. It performed very well in the jungle of Central America, thank you, supporting the camp’s inverted-V dipole from a standard U.S. Army military mast. Nor was there anything lightweight about the antenna fashioned entirely of plain-vanilla twin lead. This worked just fine for Lt. Col. Darrel Wyatt’s Army Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS) station linking the 73rd U.S. Army Field Hospital Belize Detachment with its home base in St. Petersburg, Fla. Why duct tape and twin lead? “The antenna had to fit in a duffel bag,” Wyatt explained. “There wasn’t room for anything fancier.” ACM7RAA, one of the newest soldier stations in the Army MARS, proved to be a very busy one on its maiden deployment in February 2003. During the first days of operation it handled priority resupply traffic plus phone patch connections by the dozen between the deployed troops (predominately called-up reservists) and their families back home. The soldiers’ mission in Central America was humanitarian, with an overtone of preparedness for war. The 73rd provided medical care for Task Force Jaguar, an engineer team drawn from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps building community facilities for the impoverished population. Its medics also brought unfortunately rare health care to villages nearby. Wyatt is a physician in the civilian side of his life (based in Crystal River, Fla.) and a 33-year veteran in the Army reserves. He’s also an extra-class amateur radio operator known to Florida MARS by the military call sign AAV4FB and the billet assignment of state MARS recruitment coordinator on the staff of state MARS director Bert Fow AAA4FL. Wyatt and the initial detachment arrived in Central America Feb. 15. By 5 p.m. that day he had joined the regular Florida MARS afternoon traffic net. Among the first messages handled was a MARSgram (morale-and-welfare message) to his friend and fellow MARS member Becky Norman, AAV4FN, back in Crystal River: “All arrived safely. No landline. No e-mail. In case of emergency send MARS priority. While Belize was getting on the air, MARS phone patch stations back in the United States went on the watch to handle contacts with families back home. Operators in nearly a dozen states pitched in to relay the calls as propagation came and went. (When veterans and friends in Ocala Fla., site of the Florida MARS phone patch station AAR4CSS, heard of the operation, they began contributing phone cards to help pay for the long-distance connections within the United States) Later, back home, Wyatt described the operation. “Base Camp Iceberg started with an empty field,” he said. “No electricity, no water, no phone, no fence. Plenty of bugs! Including very large scorpions. There was one small boa constrictor.” For MARS operation, Wyatt had a Kenwood TS 450s, an Ameritron 811 amplifier and 3kw MFJ tuner. Power came from the hospital’s two 100-kw generators. “The linear’s relay circuit was inoperable upon arrival so we did not have a functioning amplifier,” Wyatt said. ”Still, we had particularly good propagation to Tennessee, Missouri, New York, and Pennsylvania. Propagation was less reliable to Florida. Air Force MARS was very supportive as well.”
