Winter Harbor Navy Antenna Site, Maine

This was the modern antenna site for the Winter Harbor Naval Security Group, which operated two sites in the area related to long-range communication, the first starting in 1935. This 450 acre site had three antenna systems, the first built around 1951. A second antenna array was built around 1961, a circular Wullenweber Antenna, which was one of more than a dozen “direction-finding” antennas of this type used by the Navy from 1961 to the late 1990s. The Wullenweber Antenna, known as an AN/FRD-10 type, had concentric circular arrays of towers with an outer diameter of a few hundred feet, surrounding a central control building. They were located at different sites all over the world (in the US at Toa Baja, Puerto Rico; Homestead, Florida; Chesapeake, Virginia; Adak, Alaska; Marietta, Washington; Skaggs Island and Imperial Beach, California; and Wahiawa, Hawaii), and were used to locate Russian submarines, as well as having other surveillance functions. Most have been torn down, though their footprint and central block house often remains, as it does here. A third system was built here in 1970, when a program called Classic Wizard started, also known as an Advanced Tactical Ocean Surveillance System.  The antenna array had four radomes, and a central operations building. Remains of the structures from this program are still on site, though the naval functions have ended, and the property has been transferred to other entities.