Talk:Cambridge Bay LORAN Tower

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Is the tower grounded or insulated against ground? For which kind of LORAN was it used? LORAN-A or LORAN-C?

Guyed or free-standing?

The tower looks on the pictures as a free-standing structure. Is it additionally guyed?

Yes. Because we have poor lighting right now (no sunrise) it took me several days to double check that it was guyed. The wires don't appear in any of the pictures I have but as soon as the conditions are right and I can get there I will get another shot of it. However, I don't have a snowmobile right now so it might have to wait until the snow melts and the road oepns up again. Late June and it should be OK. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 03:44, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I spent two years at Cambridge Bay in the early 1950's and have climbed this tower. The tower is insulated from ground and is not guyed. What appears to be guys from the top of the tower are 'top loading' which increases the efficiency of the tower. They do not support the tower. The aerial view shows the large buried ground system, which, from the air, might be considered as guying. This station was to be the eastern end of the "Beatle" Loran chain. The chain was never completed. The base of the tower is about 40 feet per side i.e. 1600 sq. feet. Wattsma6 20:29, 23 September 2007 (UTC)Wattsma6 20:25, 23 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

LORAN replaced by DEW? That sounds like a misunderstanding

The article claims the tower "became redundant with the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line in the 1950s" (and cites one ref that makes that claim). This doesn't make a lick of sense. LORAN is a positioning system, used for navigation; DEW (and its replacement NWS) is a radar system, that actively probes for planes and missiles. They don't do the same job, and don't look remotely like one another. It seems that ref has entirely conflated two different things, for two different purposes, in two different places.

As I understand it:

There was a LORAN (later LORAN-C) tower located east of the town of Cambridge Bay (across the water). When it became unsafe, it was demolished in 2014 and was replaced by a shorter LORAN-C tower in much the same location. That seems to be what the Nunatsiaq News article is saying, and I can see a similar tower on Streetview now.
There was a DEW station (a white elevated raydome containing a rotating early-warning radar system). That was on the site of the airport. It was later replaced with a similar NWS system, again at the airport.

So that paragraph, despite what its source claims, is nonsense, right? -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 21:51, 10 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]