What is this?

[Douglas Hansen]

This strange circular array of metal domes is behind a locked fence at the top of Mt. Vision, on the Point Reyes Peninsula (northern California). It's the top of the hill behind my house.

Any guesses what it does? Whatever it is does not seem to involve electricity, at least not now. Some of the domes have been replaced.

Thanks

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[John Kogel]

If that is not a Stonehenge for extraterrestrials, I don't know what else it could be. []

The Golden State is home to some wacky people, is it not?

[gtblum]

I'm not sure what it is, but I heard some people in both Colorado and Washington started building the same things right after the election.

[Scottpat]

Radar domes of some type.

[Marc]

There's one at the end of a landing strip at a local airport. An alternative to the rotating radar maybe?

[John Kogel]

Radar domes in a circle?

Point Reyes was a base for Marconi's early work in ship to shore radio. Some of the antenna arrays can stll be seen in the area.

http://www.pbase.com/dougfrost

(you'll have to search this guy's gallery, sorry about that.)

Read about the radio station here:

http://radiomarine.org/gallery/show?key ... nel=pab1_9

Point Reyes is one of the windiest places on earth. The domes protect the antennae.

That is my theory, at least.

[Richard Moore]

Cheap way to set up a large (largish) array radio telescope? SETI?

[hausdok]

I might be wrong, but it looks like a Nexrad weather array.

Got any TV stations out there that use a high tech doppler radar to predict your weather? If so, look them up on the net and study their sweep pattern and look for the center - if its on top of Mt. Vision, you've got it.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

[Douglas Hansen]

Thanks everyone. So far I think the closest answer was John's theory of an extraterrestrial Stonehenge.

I checked as best I could from google, and it is not a Nexrad.

Each dome is about 30 inches across, and secured with bolts with wing nuts. It looks like a 2-person job to try to take one of them off (not that I would try).

I keep hoping I will run into a ranger up there (this fenced off area is a half mile past the end of the public road, which ends at a locked gate). Maybe if I do run into a ranger they can explain it.

The Marconi stuff is about 5 miles West of Mt. Vision. This photo is taken from Mt. Vision, looking at Point Reyes. Drake's Bay is on the left and the foreground is Drake's Estero. The radio antennae are to the right of the area in this photo. I didn't realize all the history of this, and it is right near us. Thanks!

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[Richard Moore]

So I found this topo map that has your thing marked as a "Radio Range Station".

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Also a Google Earth screen capture for the fun of it.

Download Attachment: CapturegoogleE.JPG

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When I then Googled "Radio Range Station" images, I came across a different but similar set up that was described as...

"D-VOR (VHF omnidirectional radio range) ground station of radio navigation system for aircraft".

So it seems it may be (or was?) a navigational radio beacon. In these days of GPS I didn't know they still used them, but I guess back-up ain't a bad thing.

[Rob Amaral]

I've seen those near airports (PVD in particular).

[Erby]

There's one someplace around most major airports. Needed for aircraft navigation. Lexington's is about 5 or 6 miles southeast of the airport.

Doug's looks like an older model. More detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range

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Doug, glad to see you had some time to get out in the woods. Pretty picture from the mountain top.

[Jim Baird]

The New Yorker recently had an article about an artist named Trevor Paglen that photographs "black sites" from long distances. These are secret govt facilties where access is restricted. He has lately been lately trying to photograph drones.

http://www.paglen.com/_oldsite/

[Marc]

Using Erby's link, it's a VHF transmitter that tells a pilot within 200 miles of the VOR what direction his plane is relative to the VOR array. If a pilot wants to land at a certain runway and there's a VOR on either end of it, he looks up the frequency of that particular VOR in his book and tunes in to it. His instrument will then go live and indicate whether he's lined up with the VOR/landing strip or not. If he's not lined up, it will tell him by how many degrees he's off so he can maneuver to land.

Douglas's VOR looks like it has about 40 domes to it which means a pilot's instrument tuned to that VOR will indicate within a range of 9 degrees which direction he is.

Or so it seems from the description.

Marc

[Tom Raymond]

Wow, you need all that to land your Parrot?

[Marc]

Wow, you need all that to land your Parrot?

The Parrot is gone. My spouse can hear and called Brookstone Corporate. They agreed to take the bird back, based on the salesman's failure to correctly quote the store's return policy.

Still waiting on reimbursement.

Like I said...nice toy but too unsteady to take decent photos and the bird drops dead in eight minutes or less. My first few forays yielded less than one minute of flight time.

Marc