"CARTWHEEL" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the pixels, on a need-to-know basis, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768/
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I really really like this shot, great work!
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Captured with the Rodenstock 23mm/5.6 HR Digaron-S lens (@ f/6,3), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50), Phase One XT camera (1/25 sec exposure).
This unassuming cylindrical tower, at first glance perhaps a grain silo or water tower, was part of a secret "continuity of government" microwave communications network. Built in the early 1960's, a network of similar towers located around the capital region linked the White House with critical sites such as Camp David, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather.
The upper white section of the tower is actually a plexiglass radome, concealing various microwave and UHF radio antennas.
CARTWHEEL and its cousins were decommissioned around 1990. Most of the towers, mainly atop mountains in remote areas, were demolished or left to rot. However, CARTWHEEL and CORKSCREW (on a mountain near the Appalachian trail in central Maryland) have been maintained in good condition, now repurposed by the FAA.
If I remember correctly you already posted one of the other towers of this microwave network. Wasn`t that the one featuring these large horn antennas below and 4G/5G dishes on top?
@[email protected] That was a different network. The horns and microwave dishes on that tower were disused, and the tower repurposed as a cell site.
Ah ok, different network., rremember. As you mentioned thíngs going unnoticed in plain sight. Everybody passing by the Russian embassy to the UN in Vienna could see 4 large dishes on top. Nobody cared what they might be doing there for years .
Late in 2022 we shot the roof with zooms & sent a drone up. Voilà: a full blown #SIGiNT station with a dozen dishes. And the NSA watching them from their "stateroom" hut above the nearby US embassy to the UN.
And meanwhile we have sort of re-engineered three of these four-meter dishes and identified their targets. All three are C-band dishes and there are not that many C-band sats around any more in the segment from Greenwich to 15°.
Posted a thread on this lately, always fediverse first, and I'm currently doing a longread for a magazine here.
tl;dr: They are collecting signals intelligence mainly for their African putsch politics
Russki #SIGINT 2.0
https://chaos.social/deck/@harkank/113115103774149785
@harkank Extremely interesting.
Are these receive-only (have you detected any signals coming out of them)?
None of these 3 large dishes is active. Same with dish 4 in the back, this one is for the Ku band. Dish 1,2 and 4 are equipped with skew angle gear & motors to squint into downlinks.
C-Band modules - LNCs, filters & c - are all from Nortel Canada. The Ku band modules are from Swedish Microwave.
Vienna is by far the largest and one of the few remaining #SIGINT stations in EU on Russki embassies.
Tech staffers were all kicked out except here
Despite CARTWHEEL being located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in a busy city and staffed by military personnel, officials went to great lengths to conceal the true purpose of these towers. They hid in plain sight, appearing to be silos or water towers (they even used civilian water trucks to send crews to some of the towers).
It was only after the cold war ended that the details of the network were declassified.
Obsolete secret infrastructure like CARTWHEEL tower, only revealed decades later, intrigues me not just for its scale and design, but also for the obvious question it gives rise to. If this stuff effectively managed to stay unnoticed for decades, what newer secrets are hiding under our noses today?
@[email protected] Just curious, how much do you know about the FAA use of CORKSCREW nowadays?
@[email protected] I'm not sure what exactly the do with them. They own both CORKSCREW and CARTWHEEL, and maintain both in good condition (with activity). They also erected an HF antenna next to CORKSCREW.
@[email protected] Just curious. Everything I know about the two is open source, but I think I’m still supposed to keep my mouth shut about them.
@[email protected] What's really annoying is when you work on a secret project that has gotten exposed to the public, I STILL CAN'T TALK ABOUT IT. I got to do some interesting things back when I was doing consulting, but still have to put the cover story on my resume.