I didn’t go into the military dreaming about satellites. I didn’t even really know what satcom was when I signed the paperwork.
All I said was that I liked computers. That was enough for the recruiter, who nodded, rummaged through a mental filing cabinet, and showed me a video. Operators running through forests, portable dishes slung on their backs, throwing up emergency satellite links in the thick of nowhere. It looked sharp, technical. Urgent. I said yes because it felt alive. I said yes because, even then, I knew I needed something more real than sitting behind a desk stacking paper forms.
What I got wasn’t a backpack dish. It was an AN/TSC-167F satellite communications shelter—a system the size of a small trailer, planted in the desert, baked under a brutal sun until the panels warped and the electronics screamed. It took a Humvee just to move it an inch. Once it was placed, that was your home until someone higher up decided otherwise.
And it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
It didn’t happen all at once. At first, it was just learning survival: how to keep the shelter powered, how to fix cables cooked under endless sunlight, how to trace a dead link by hand in a sandstorm. But somewhere in those early months, the systems started to make sense not just mechanically, but personally. Signal flow wasn’t just something we talked about in troubleshooting checklists — it became something I could feel. Where the energy moved. Where it broke. Where it breathed.
I didn’t just want to fix gear. I wanted to understand it. So I dug deeper. I built a presentation tracing the entire history of satcom—from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1945 essay imagining geosynchronous relays, to early moonbounce communications where we used the Moon itself as a passive satellite, to the first trembling signals of Project SCORE and Telstar. I joined SSPI. Paid my dues out of pocket, without anyone telling me to. I wasn’t looking for a career boost. I just wanted to stand inside the larger story.
It was the first job where I felt a real pride not just in how I did the work, but in the work itself. In the quiet moments between shifts, when the shelter hummed steady under the desert night and the signal bounced clean and strong through the black, it felt almost sacred. Like carrying a thread laid down by people who dreamed of reaching beyond the horizon before we had the tools to do it.
There were the rough nights too, of course. Like the time a dust storm ripped through and threw the dish out of alignment, snapping movement cables, killing powered control. No fanfare. No heroics. Just me, a hand crank, and a stubborn few thousand turns to force the beast back into the sky. I didn't think about it at the time, but that's probably when I realized it: I didn't just like the work. I believed in it.
I believed in the signal.
It’s been more than a decade now. I’ve left that world behind, at least physically. The knowledge fades. The systems move on. The field changes faster than I ever could have kept up.
But when I think about who I became back then — standing at the controls, tracing signal flow under a dead sun, trusting my own hands to carry the thread forward — it still feels like one of the clearest, cleanest things I’ve ever known.
Not the easiest time. Not the most glorious.
Just the right one.