Former Navy Club Station

Dave Mueller

When I ride, I follow a loop around the housing area in which I live. This loop follows some of the old Navy roads that transit behind the South Finegayan housing area and coincidentally passes the old Navy MARS/Amateur Radio club station. This station started falling into disrepair about 20 years ago, and was ultimately condemned and demolished. Few reminders of its existence remain.

Looking at the access road to the club station from outside the back of the housing area
The jungle has largely overtaken the road leading to the station. Still perfect for mountain biking, however!
The parking lot of the station is completely overgrown. The shack itself was located just to the left of center in this photo
From one of the tower bases, a few of the poles remain standing. The building was located on the top of the rise between the two telephone poles to the right.
One of the tower bases remain

The Government paid a lot of money for this radiotelephone back in the day!

This land has since been turned over to the Government of Guam, and the area is frequented by hunters and those scavenging metal for the recyclers.

Some unscrupulous but motivated thief dug up some buried cables looking for copper. When they found telephone twisted pair only – they gave up.

The towers are certainly long gone – but are they? It turned out that two crank-up towers were recently stolen and dragged about 1/2 mile where they sat for a number of months. I stumbled across them during a bike ride, and had plans to recover them. But, I was too late…

Recently, someone cut both towers in half with a torch to facilitate their removal to the scrap dealer
Telescoped aluminum tubing from an old yagi remained scattered on the ground – this aluminum is probably more valuable as scrap than the tower itself
Not a big travesty; the top section of the taller tower to the right is bent as you can see in the photo
A close-up of the bent top section
I gathered all the aluminum tubing and rode home with it – plenty here to finish my planned 40m vertical array