In 1974 the US Army taught me all about its various types of radios and how to troubleshoot and fix them at the component, i.e., transistor level. When I got the White House Communications Agency I learned I had to operate those radios and the encryption units too. Luckily with few exceptions, the mode of transmission was voice.
The radios were Motorola FM band walkie-talkies for the Secret Service and staff when preparing for and during a presidential or veep visit. And we always long-haul Air Force or Navy HF band communication systems as backup in case the phone system became unavailable.
In 1979 when I joined the Special Forces, my first assignment was to the group signal company where the long haul communications systems included one thousand watt HF radios, encryptors, and teletypes. All mounted into the back of a 5-ton truck.
After switching to an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) I was focused on my new passion, medicine. I was taking nursing night courses at the local community college and excited about attending the special forces medical course.
But like being typecast as an actor the company commander found out about my past and I instantly became a radio operator. NOTE: The two hardest training courses in the special forces at the time were medical and radio operator.
I had not attended the special forces course but that did not matter to a commander overrun by weapons and demolitions NCO’s.
It was also at this time that I realized that gravity and a 90lbs rucksack, not including weapon and load bearing equipment (LBE) sucked!
I remember being on a DEA sponsored and paid for counter-drug mission with a 105lbs rucksack and tripping. I fell face first into the trail, turning my head at the last second. My team kept patrolling, quietly snickering as they walked by then took a security halt while I rolled over on my side. I got my feet under me and stood dirty but not bleeding, shaking my head at my sloppy footwork.
Anyway, back to the radios. When transmitting, as we did in Morse code, it can take a while to tap out a message. The good news was the CIA had created some mechanical devices to speed up message sending for spies, aka, bursting messages. Great more stuff to carry. The devices, which can now be seen in the NSA cryptologic museum, included a device for encoding the message on tape, the tape units, and a device which when wound up would play the taped message out faster than the ear could pick up.
So, we would connect the burst device to an encryption device (that we’d already loaded with the appropriate encryption key) that was connected to the radio that was connected to a long wire antenna that we’d setup to match a certain frequency at a certain time of day in a certain part of the world. Easy day!
In 1981 the US Army took baby steps into the digital world with the production of the Digital Message Device Group that permitted an operator to enter a message and store it then send it whenever time and mission permitted it. It was a 9lbs device with keyboard and backlit dot matrix screen.
We still had to carry the radio, encryptor, extra batteries, and antenna kit but we didn’t need the mechanical devices and those less sensitive items to carry and account for.
In 1998 the next step up was to the heavens, literally. The AN/PSC-3 satellite communications radio which could operate in satellite or Line of Sight modes. I took the DMDG communications speed from 27 baud on HF to 1200 baud per second on satellite.
From there the radios got smaller and the encryption was brought on board, reducing the need for a separate unit and cable that could break.
In the mid-90s we had palm sized digital message devices and encryptors like:
But we started carrying computers so now a special forces communications NCO still carries 75-100lbs in a ruck but it’s all “High Speed Low Drag -- Lite Weight Gear”
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