Users
The TRC-97 was initially made for the Marine Corps to help them with their military operations, such as the Vietnam War. It originally only had only 12 multiplex channels, but when the Air Force decided to use the fine piece of equipment, they added an additional 12 channels in another module called the baby mux, next to the cabinet that houses the klystron. (This modification caused the equipment to be recognized as the TRC-97A.) Wired to voice channel 1 was a 16 channel teletype multiplexer. Under the care of the Marines, the radio set was expected to live only three months, but when the Air Force took over that versatile radio set, they had been using it for more than 20 years in the 1980s.
There are several military organizations that have used the TRC-97 and TRC-97A. One such organization was the 601st Tactical Control Wing, headquartered in Sembach Air Base, near Kaiserslautern, Germany, which has one of the largest concentrations of Americans outside of the United States. Also the 606 Tactical Control Squadron, Basdahl, GE outside of Bremerhaven, GE on the North Sea. There was also the 626 and 636 Tactical Control Flights along with the 601st, 602nd and 606th Tactical Control Squadrons fell under the 601st Tactical Control Wing, and military personnel assigned to those squadrons often went on deployment to various sites in Germany, thereby providing a show of force during the cold war.
The 602nd Tactical Control Squadron was located in Turkheim, Germany, which was a remote village in Bavaria. The nearest military installation was an Army installation in Neu Ulm, Germany. The 602nd Tactical Control Squadron closed in 1985, when the United States agreed to minimize their military presence in Germany.
In the 1970s, several TRC-97s were turned over to Air National Guard bases stateside.
The 5th Tactical Control Group based at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines used the TRC-97 extensively. The 5th TAC's mission was augmentation manning of SEA (Southeast Asia) radar installations. Many, if not most, of those missions were performed via TDY (temporary duty) support to Korea, Vietnam and surrounding areas during the Vietnam War. Most of these microwave links were used to provide communication links between the radar sites and the aircraft bases.
Read more about this topic: AN/TRC-97