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“First in, last out” isn’t just a catchy motto for the members of the 1st Expeditionary Combat Communications Squadron from Ramstein. These 25 Airmen have been in place at Forward Operating Site at Lora Naval Base in Split, Croatia, since April 21 – days before any Combined Endeavor 2008 or Medical Exercise, Central Europe participants set boots on the ground. Both exercises ran until Wednesday.
“This year’s Combined Endeavor is different from others, because [there are] two exercises in separate locations. We are simultaneously supporting 101 members here in Split and a more than 380-strong multi-national force in Divulje,” said Capt. Pablo Juarez, 1st ECBCS deployed commander. “It takes extensive planning to be able to conduct two exercises at once. We had several conferences and our site survey team was tasked with determining equipment requirements for both sites.”
The 1st ECBCS Airmen are not only providing basic infrastructure support such as computers and phones to both Croatian sites, they are also responsible for connectivity to the CE08 main site in Lager Aulenbach, Germany.
“We’re not just the hub for the 10 nations here in Combined Endeavor, we’re actually counting 11 nations by including the MEDCEUR site in Divulje,” said Airman 1st Class Billy Doyle, a tactical voice technician for CE08. “We’re the main hub for communications between Germany and Croatia. All the voice and data traffic comes through us. Without us, the MEDCEUR site wouldn’t have anything and the mission would not be a success.”
Setting up communication support from scratch is something the 1st CBCS is trained to do, and setting up for two sites just added a more challenging aspect to the mix.
“We train every month to set up communications in bare-base locations,” Airman Doyle said. “It took us about 36 hours to get everything set up and running at the two sites. We have [personnel] working 12-hour shifts to establish the communications links.”
One more interesting challenge the Airmen of 1st ECBCS overcame was finding a location to put their site-to-site links.
“We had to get creative to figure out where we would put the equipment to make sure there wasn’t any interference from the ships on the water or any buildings between us,” said Captain Juarez. “We have our equipment on the top of the hill, and the [Divulje] site has theirs on top of a three-story building. It took the team about three hours of on-site work at MEDCEUR to align their microwave equipment with the equipment over here.”
Like syncing a TV satellite dish at home to get the best signal, the transmission equipment used for CE08 and MEDCEUR must be positioned “just so” to catch and send the strongest signals possible to and from Divulje, which is about six miles across the bay, as well as the satellite systems connecting the FOS sites to Germany.
“If we were to give the LOS (line of site) microwave equipment a shake or knock it out of position, we would kill the signal to the MEDCEUR site and they would be communications isolated,” Captain Juarez said.
The 1st ECBCS will continually monitor and maintain the communications for both exercises until the end of the exercise, then pack up and return to Germany to prepare for the next mission – but not until after everyone else has gone home.
