I was at Montauk AFS after I returned from Cold Bay, Alaska from November 1974 - May 1978.

The site had crappy TV reception. This was because, even though we were on Long Island we did not get New York City broadcast signals good enough to make those old tube-TV sets work well.

The cable TV company only ran it`s cable service to Amagansett. Then there was that 12 - 20 mile of narrow stretch of land out to Montauk.

As Montauk had only a small population all year long - because most of the people were tourists from NYC from Memorial Day - Labor Day, I would guess that it was not profitable then to install cable TV that final 20 miles.

Besides, I don`t think that the tourist motels cared anyway because the people came out to go to the beach everyday.

On base, the single troops in the barracks had rabbit ears on their personal TV sets, as well as the barracks set, I believe. I lived both on the beach in a government lease and then in base housing and could only pick up TV from New Haven, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island and sometimes New Bedford, Massachuttes, via an antenna rotor.

One day around the Bicentennial time, I was appointed to the site Airman-NCO Advisory Council. The troops in the barracks would complain about the crummy TV and what could we do to make it better.

I ended up being coordinator for a project to wire up the barracks area with an on-site antenna system. During brainstorming we learned that the good folks at the Roslyn Air National Guard unit on Long Island was looking for some interesting projects to install during their weekend deployments.

To make a long story short, they accepted the challenge and their next season they arrived on site with a convoy of trucks and technicans. Over the course of about 4 months on weekends and two-weeks in the summer, they installed the fixed TV antennas on the FPS-35 tower pointing towards the TV stations across Long Island Sound. They installed distribution amplifiers and ran cable into all the barracks and orderly room and some other "necessary" buildings. They didn`t run the project into the base housing area, though. I guess we could justify it for the "troops in the barracks" under Project Better Life or some such name. They installed booster amplifiers in the attics of the barracks. The troops were happy! Especially during the winter months when the beach was too cold for anything and the town was almost dead of life because all the tourists went back to the City by September!

So, that`s the story... Wonderful folks at Roslyn ANG who were so happy to get out of the City and come visit us and help make our lifes better!... And it seems that the TV antennas are still hanging there off the side of the FPS-35 Tower after 25+ years!