Project Maroon Bowsprit

Originally posted by Golf66
That is an antenna array. Like the ones you mentioned elsewhere. If you line up the locations you'll see there is one to "listen" to all of our areas of interest. Asia, Middle East, SE Asia, The South Pacific, Russia etc.

That one probably focuses on Cuba and the Caribbean area as well as some of South America.

They are at locations around the world and are used for radio intercept (SIGINT) and radio direction finding (RDF). They can be directed from various field stations across the world to intercept radio signals for the purpose of collecting intelligence on our enemies. NSA.

The antennas are not classified as they are there for all to see but their capabilities are.

The FRD-10's are pretty much all gone now. I think the Canadians are the only one's to have them now at two of their sites. But i could be wrong.

The one in San Diego is still there but the buildings are abandoned. I helped close it down.

After thinking and doing some reading...not much to find. I think Bowsprit was the project name for the Classic Sail system that the Elint folks used. I know it used a PDP-11. That was the big thing at the time. It seems so "Stone Age" now...lol The software people had their own little office both active duty and NSA civilians worked in it.

This was 20+ years ago, so the memory is a bit hazy on some of the details.

Originally posted by bg_socalif
The FRD-10's are pretty much all gone now. I think the Canadians are the only one's to have them now at two of their sites. But i could be wrong.

The one in San Diego is still there but the buildings are abandoned. I helped close it down.

True it is old tech and most of those missions are now performed by overheads but I am fairly certain they left some of the infrastructure in case we somehow lose all the overheads at once say in a burst or sun spot event. The military is really hip on redundancy. That way they can retrofit them fairly quickly - at least faster than firing more overheads into orbit.

Originally posted by at1withharmony11
Very interesting post , I know of a few places that are similar , Theres 2 spots I know of and i believe they have the same name called The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program HAARP for short ,ones located in Alaska and the other is i believe in Norway .When you actually do your research on these places ,you will be shocked to see what they can do and have been doing! Peace

This guy is on the right track I think, this program could have been a precursor to HAARP, if they're bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere, it's not a far conclusion to think they might have upped the ante at some point in a few decades.

Golf ball research. The mil. likes to play golf.

reply to post by Thermo Klein


Two projects were launched in the late 70's to improve the data processing capabilities of the Naval Security Group Command, these were Maroon Bowsprit and Maroon Sail. "Maroon" was the designation of the development programs. When introduced officially as operational systems, the "Maroon" designator was changed to "Classic" and the two systems were brought on-line, Classic Bowsprit at Edzell, Scotland and Classic Sail at Homestead, Florida. These two systems were the forerunners of computer automation supporting a sub-set of the intelligence community. They have long since been replaced by more advanced and powerful processing capabilities.

Did google search Classic Sail, Homestead, Florida

NSGA Homestead, Florida Veterans E-mail Roster
www.navycthistory.com/rosters/homestead_email_roster.html
Navy Logo, NSGA Homestead Logo, CNSG Logo ... Ralph Bishop, -, CTOC, Classic Sail, SpecOps, DIRSUP, 03/81 - 03/85, Email. Wayne L. Bolton, -, CTA2 ...

a reply to: Thermo Klein

I worked for a place that had one in S.E. Asia..... the antenna was called the elephant cage. In the 70s the antenna was connected to a whole bunch of technician's head phones who could at their independent stations dial in a particular frequency they wished to listen to. At Ramason Station in Thailand the Tecs could listen to taxi cabs in New York City depending on atmospheric conditions. The antenna was used to listen to all forms of radio transmissions. Usually the source was chosen from a military standpoint due to their nefarious activities. This was in the 70s so no telling what they have now or can do.

During the war; the Elephant cage would do an intercept and we would go fly and monitor certain frequencies hoping the transmitter would come back on line. Due to our speed and a half moon or circular orbit we could fix the location of the transmitter and if the transmitter was a military target other assets were called in to silence the transmitter. This could be artillery, airstrikes or even a B-52 or 3 if the transmitters were tied to a battalion size elements which had been declared hostile.

The automatic gun fire detectors in many cities work on the same principle as far as fixing a location though triangulations . If you have two or more sensors where the sound comes from draw a line and where the lines cross is the location. Our equipment could fix locations down to something much smaller than a block even back in the 70s.

Bingo! I was assigned there in 1972 after returning from an NSA listening post in Turkey, part of the Air Force Security Service, the Card Road site run by the Naval Security Group. I was a Morse intercept operator, one of about a dozen or so who listened to Cuban targets. These were all over the world. We gathered far more signal data than could possibly be processed. All this was declassified in the '90s, reported on by Newsweek in the '80s, so I don't know why folks still won't talk about it. We had the FLR-9 "elephant cage" antenna array in Turkey. We were told NOT to take pictures of it. It WAS classified. We all did, of course. I still have mine. Fascinating period. Too bad it was so violent.

originally posted by: windus
Not that I know anything about how code names are come to, but another way of looking at Maroon Bowsprit is bowsprit being obviously from a ship and maroon could mean being marooned, not the colour.

This thread is the first one to make me genuinely curious and hunting again in a long time.

Edit to Add: I did a google indexing of www.navycthistory.com for for the word maroon first: nothing.
I did the same for the word bowsprit, and got this text file:

canick_louis_l.txt

It mentions Bowsprit several times with capitalization:

After A school, got orders to Ft. Meade for PDP-11 school .. to prepare for Bowsprit maintenance. The PDP-11training was great. But we didn't learn anything about Bowsprit.

It may mean nothing, but read the document for yourself (especially OP. Could it reveal something more in your memories?)

I know this is an older thread...but just so you know...PDP-11 was one of the first 32 bit minicomputer ever made that was small and relatively cheap for its day. DEC or Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers the size of a two drawer filing cabinet were bought by the tens and hundreds by the NSA and NRO in the 1960's. MY WATCH now has computing horsepower than those sleds...but...during their heyday...they broke soviet codes and many pdp's were shipped to us intel ops bases in greenland and northern canada to break those codes and do signals analysis and EARLY digital photo analysis such as very basic automated image object search and recognize functions. The pdp minicomputers also did an early version of differential cryptoanalysis to break those soviet codes. I suspect any project that used the moniker Maroon was for operations directed at
SOVIET controlled states such as Cuba rather than mother russia itself. Red would be used as the designation for ops against the Kremlin itself i.e. Red Mercury or Red Fury.

originally posted by: ezekielken
An ultra secret highly classified project that they had coffee cups made for? I am definitely freaking out now!

And t-shirts. And sometimes belt buckles, apparently. We never got belt buckles, but DOE used to do that.

But yeah, some coffee cups are "Oh, #" material, and occasionally they are too over the top and you have a mass crushing, with a few left in the SCIF for posterity. You're actually more likely to find mission mugs than patches unless you're AF.

a reply to: StargateSG7

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Ooops! PDP-11 is a 16-bit computer NOT a 32-Bit computer

See Website on PDP-11:

en.wikipedia.org...

The DEC VAX-780 (with VMS OS created by Dave Cutler of Microsoft Windows NT Team
lead programmer/manager fame) was the later DEC minicomputer that is truly 32-bit.


See DEC VAX series website:
en.wikipedia.org...


---

The PDP-11 was also CONSIDERABLY LARGER than a 2-drawer file cabinet.

The 2-drawer file cabinet minicomputer was the much later MICRO-VAX
which did in fact fit underneath or beside an office desk

So apologies: My memory failed me! Wrong computers and time period!