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Twenty-five Soldiers and Green Berets with 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) contended in the inaugural Menton Improvised Antenna Competition at Joint Base-Lewis McChord, Washington Dec. 7, 2023.
The competition originated as an idea produced by servicemembers within the Group Support Battalion (GSB), 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), as a way to bring together a group of people with different perspectives or understandings of the signal trade.
"The whole spirit of the competition is to take what you learned in the schoolhouse, use things that are commonly available and see what you can create," said the sergeant first class running the competition. "The way this is applied, to steal from my sergeant major, is that this is like doing 'ditch medicine'- using what you have around you, not necessarily what an operating room would provide you if you were treating a casualty."
The event called participants to construct functional short-wave antennas using commonly available goods or materials. These "homebrew" antennas would then be directly employed across seven separate goal-oriented lanes and be evaluated, alongside their creators, on their combined effectiveness, tenacity, and creativity.
"I think real life doesn't always match the theory," a participating first lieutenant military intelligence officer with 3rd Battalion said. "You have all these equations and formulas; people will tell you 'This will work' or 'This is what we learned in the Signal AIT [advanced individual training]' and then you get out here and it's raining, or the ground is uneven."
These goal-oriented lanes involved measuring how far contestants' high frequency antennas' signal could reach, how many frequencies they could receive or pick up within a limited time window, which antenna had the most creative components or structure, and more.
"I found a design that was cheap but effective," said a staff sergeant cryptologic linguist with GSB during the Direction-Finding performance challenge of the competition. "We used measuring tape and metal-"
"-which made it very easy to cut as well," said her partner, another specialist cryptologic linguist on her team.
Their team's antenna won the static DF [direction-finding] performance challenge of the competition.
The competition's lanes were designed not only to stress the capabilities of each of the contestant's antennas, but also their intelligence and application of basic principles prevalent in several military occupations or specialties.
"A lot of the fundamentals that are utilized in a competition like this are taught in various courses- basic soldering, basic RF [radio frequency] electronics, antenna design, HF [high frequency] and RF theory- those are taught in basic schoolhouses across the Army," said the sergeant first class.
While the competition does test its contestant's metal and mettle, the lanes themselves are not designed to be difficult.
"I think the event as a whole is something everybody in Group can do regardless of their MOS," the sergeant first class said. "You can be an 18-series, a 25-series, you could be an EW [electronic warfare] guy, a SIGINT [signal intelligence] and all have the basic tradecraft to be able to participate in a competition like this."
Rather, they were constructed with the intent of informing the contestants on the capabilities and techniques of their equipment or materials, displaying the various possibilities available with even basic supplies.
"As soon as you start making something more technical, the population of participants shrinks significantly," the sergeant first class said."[But] even a competitor who shows up with a ball of wire can be coached through making that ball of wire into something that produces meaningful results."
Communications using these skills or techniques continues to drive modern American and partner nation military operations today, enabling forces to "shoot, move, communicate, and medicate" across a free and open Indo-Pacific.
| Date Taken: | 12.07.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 12.14.2023 19:06 |
| Story ID: | 459647 |
| Location: | JBLM, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 164 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, 1st SFG (A) spearheads inaugural Improvised Antenna Competition during Menton Week, by SGT Caleb Woodburn, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
