Big Jim

A group of Navy electronics men was tramping through a forest on the coast of Washington. "Suddenly," reported one of them, "the woods opened up as if we had come to Shangri-La." On either side of a fine little stream--Jim Creek--stood a 4,000-ft. mountain. It was just what the Navy was looking for. Last week, more than eight years later, the bears and cougars had been driven away from Jim Creek and much of the forest was gone too. In its place stands the world's most powerful radio transmitter.

Six 200-ft. towers, painted red & white, crown each of the two mountain tops. Between them in the valley swoop cables 9,000 ft. long. On the valley floor are 23 other towers, some of them 145 ft. tall, and a huge copper grounding system is now being laid under the cobweb of cables.

The transmitter building is a great, three-storied, windowless structure painted battleship grey. Out of one side of it pokes a copper tube 86 ft. long. This is the giant lead-in, which local civilians once suspected was an atomic gun.

When "Big Jim" is completed next spring, it will have cost the Navy, including machine shops and a complete little city, about $20 million. For its money the Navy gets a transmitter that broadcasts better than 1,000,000 watts of very lowfrequency waves from mountain-hung antennas more than 3,000 ft. above the valley floor. Waves of such extreme low frequency are nondirectional; they spread in all directions, and Big Jim signals will reach any part of the world. They also penetrate the ground and the sea for a considerable distance. From its gigantic squawk box at Jim Creek, the Navy can give orders to all its scattered ships, even to atomic submarines that need never cruise on the surface.

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