Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is a resort area, a playground for Chicagoans. About 70 miles from Chicago, it was a fairly short drive for us suburban kids. It was a haven for teenagers before the feds forced Wisconsin to raise the drinking age to 21, it was 18 or 19 before then. We spent many a Friday or Saturday night at the bars in the area in college. They rarely checked IDs anyway so were went there in high school as well. The whole area was centered around tourists from Chicago. The very rich had weekend homes on the lakes, the rest of us came up for an evening or, for special times, a weekend at a resort. There used to be a Playboy Club there as well, our girlfriends brought my friend Dan and I there a couple times.
Back in the late 1980’s another friend, Matt, had a condo on Lake Como, 10 minutes west of Lake Geneva. It was close enough to Lake Geneva for the nightlife but far enough to be more affordable. We would go there on weekends and try and meet girls in town, and we were occasionally successful. Most of the time however we weren’t so we always brought radios to have something interesting to do during the days or if we were tired of being shot down.
From the dock protruding into the lake, we could see a hugely tall radio tower a bit to the west of Lake Como. We tried to find it but could not find the base of the tower. This was a recurring story for Matt and I.
On various trips he and I took over the years we would scope out towers we were interested in, either found during our wandering or on a trip specifically for that purpose. One was in Toluca, IL. There was a ham radio repeater on 2M that would occasionally be heard in our North suburban area during band openings. We found it was on a TV tower outside of town for the Peoria market. On another trip thru Iowa, we could see a hugely tall tower from I-80. We decided to find it and discovered it was much further off the highway than we thought due to its height. We eventually found it and, while standing underneath it one would get vertigo looking up at the top.
These adventures fueled our quest to find this tower in Wisconsin. It was elusive as it was tall, it wasn’t until 5 years later that we discovered it was in a farmer’s back yard. Now this was in the days long before Google Earth and when my dad and brother-in-law (both private pilots) took me on a flight to Dodgeville WI to see the C-97 parked out front. A little side story here: This Korean War era cargo hauler had been used to film a Mercury commercial with Farrah Fawcett some years before. The Don Q Inn, named after its original owner, Don Quinn, bought it. The hotel was known as a “Hundred Dollar Hamburger” spot as people would fly into the airstrip that was on the property, have lunch at the hotel restaurant and fly back to Milwaukee, Chicago or wherever. That is what we did that day. The food was good, and the hotel was quirky, besides the C-97 they had all kinds of artifacts and custom rooms at the hotel, there was a church steeple set up as a honeymoon suite, a tunnel between buildings with farm implements embedded in the concrete walls and other weird stuff. The hotel bar was built around a fire pit made from a corn silo (This is Wisconsin after all) and there were barber chairs encircling the fire pit.
This C-97 was flown to the hotel in Dodgeville and landed on that little 2800-foot-long runway barley long enough for Cessnas. It could only land eastbound as there was a cliff off the west end of the runway (as some pilots found out over the years). To increase the chance of a successful landing they filled in the ditches on either side of the highway and cut down the corn in the field across the road to allow for an overrun. Too low and the plane would hit the face of the cliff, too high and it would summersault into the farm field. They were able to land this huge transport plane on the runway without incident somehow. One could buy the VHS videotape of the landing for $29.95 at the giftshops in the hotel and on the aircraft itself back then. For those too cheap to pay for it they played in on a loop in the coffee shop in the airplane. The plane remains to this day on static display in front of the hotel but the airstrip closed years ago. You can view the landing on YouTube at
On the flight back after lunch I realized we were going to fly over Lake Geneva, so I asked Dad to fly over the area around that tower. Now I could finally see how one would get to it. We got to the area, located the tower and I shot some pictures with my trusty old Argus C3, these showed that the tower was accessed by the gated driveway leading to the home off the highway, thru the yard, past the barn and then thru the field out back. Mystery Solved!
So now we jump back in time to our original hunt 5 years before. We found we could see the tower from Highways 50 and 67 but never imagined it would be accessed by some guy’s driveway. We decided to do some real research. We went to the county seat in Elkhorn, just up the road and asked for the County Engineer. We told him what we wanted, and he came up with the topographical maps of the area. We poured over them but, while they confirmed the location of the tower, they didn’t show how one would get to it. What the map did show however was a “Military Base” adjacent to it. Our friendly engineer told us that it had been a radar emplacement during WW2 but was now the site of an industrial park.
What was really interesting about this old military base/current industrial park was that in the center was a high point indicated on the map, labeled “Radar Antenna”. Our new friend made a couple copies of the maps and we went back to the area. We found the entrance to the facility off WI-67 north of WI-50 and followed the access road in. We could see the obvious barracks buildings from its old military days along with some newer buildings used by the various businesses there. We followed the road around and it led to a round concrete pad that was about 30 feet in diameter. This was apparently the radar antenna’s location back in the day. It was, of course, the highest spot around.
As we were parked there, we could see the tower we were looking for but were no closer to finding it’s access road. We drove all over the facility to no avail. We did however discover that the area was a great place for receiving all kinds of stuff on the radios. We could hear our local GMRS repeaters from the Chicago area full scale, same for 2M and 440 ham repeaters, even our police repeater on 470 MHz. I had a work radio in my vehicle (I was “the radio guy” after all) and Matt asked for a radio check with his dispatcher, the two agencies we worked for were on the same repeater. The dispatcher said we were loud and clear and hitting 4 of the 10 satellite receivers.
Now we were more intrigued than ever. We tried some simplex work. We called a friend who was at home, and he was able to hear us on our 2M simplex frequency. We could hear almost all the Chicago PD Zone and Citywide (460 MHz.) repeaters when they weren’t being drowned out mt Milwaukee, Peoria or Iowa. We were hearing stuff from all directions. It was the Midwest version of Mountain Topping, about 1200 feet ASL Chicago averages around 500 feet, so this is, relatively speaking, a really high spot.
Now if anyone here has been at the top of Sears Tower, the Empire State Building etc. with a radio you would know how crazy the reception can be at such an elevated spot. The neat thing about this spot was that we were in a relatively RF-quiet area, so the noise floor was much lower. This allowed much better reception of distant signals from all directions. We were hearing VHF and UHF stuff from all over norther Illinois, southern Wisconsin, even into Michigan, Iowa and Minesota.
We spent the rest of the afternoon there and christened it as “Radio Hill” We would come back and visit often. If there was a band opening, or even better, a temperature inversion, we would scoot up there to see what we could find. Occasionally we would be there during low-band skip events, low-band was still popular then.
As far as I know the place is still there, but it has been decades since I have been there. Matt still lives in the area but sold the condo years ago. While we never were able to find the base of the tower that started this hunt it found for us something even better. The hours we spent there playing radio over the years were as much fun as a scanner guy could have with clothes on. We never had any problem with any of the tenants of the business park. It was mostly the province of car and boat repair and storage as well as a whole lot of junk, these guys probably never noticed or cared about a couple guys sitting in a car. At least we were in the front seat. I looked at it on Google Earth tonight and it doesn’t seem to have changed much in the 40 years since we discovered it.
Over the years I have done some real mountain-topping on real mountains, like Pike’s Peak, some places along highways in Wyoming that went above 10,000 feet and some places in the Dakotas and Nevada. I talked to a guy in Dodge City Kansas on 146.520 from Pike’s Peak when the wife and I were there a few years back. From the Sears Tower we would routinely talk back to Winnetka or Glencoe on simplex with 4-watt HT’s, some 25 miles away. I plan on getting involved with POTA and SOTA so maybe that will revive my mountain-topping interest.
Back in the late 1980’s another friend, Matt, had a condo on Lake Como, 10 minutes west of Lake Geneva. It was close enough to Lake Geneva for the nightlife but far enough to be more affordable. We would go there on weekends and try and meet girls in town, and we were occasionally successful. Most of the time however we weren’t so we always brought radios to have something interesting to do during the days or if we were tired of being shot down.
From the dock protruding into the lake, we could see a hugely tall radio tower a bit to the west of Lake Como. We tried to find it but could not find the base of the tower. This was a recurring story for Matt and I.
On various trips he and I took over the years we would scope out towers we were interested in, either found during our wandering or on a trip specifically for that purpose. One was in Toluca, IL. There was a ham radio repeater on 2M that would occasionally be heard in our North suburban area during band openings. We found it was on a TV tower outside of town for the Peoria market. On another trip thru Iowa, we could see a hugely tall tower from I-80. We decided to find it and discovered it was much further off the highway than we thought due to its height. We eventually found it and, while standing underneath it one would get vertigo looking up at the top.
These adventures fueled our quest to find this tower in Wisconsin. It was elusive as it was tall, it wasn’t until 5 years later that we discovered it was in a farmer’s back yard. Now this was in the days long before Google Earth and when my dad and brother-in-law (both private pilots) took me on a flight to Dodgeville WI to see the C-97 parked out front. A little side story here: This Korean War era cargo hauler had been used to film a Mercury commercial with Farrah Fawcett some years before. The Don Q Inn, named after its original owner, Don Quinn, bought it. The hotel was known as a “Hundred Dollar Hamburger” spot as people would fly into the airstrip that was on the property, have lunch at the hotel restaurant and fly back to Milwaukee, Chicago or wherever. That is what we did that day. The food was good, and the hotel was quirky, besides the C-97 they had all kinds of artifacts and custom rooms at the hotel, there was a church steeple set up as a honeymoon suite, a tunnel between buildings with farm implements embedded in the concrete walls and other weird stuff. The hotel bar was built around a fire pit made from a corn silo (This is Wisconsin after all) and there were barber chairs encircling the fire pit.
This C-97 was flown to the hotel in Dodgeville and landed on that little 2800-foot-long runway barley long enough for Cessnas. It could only land eastbound as there was a cliff off the west end of the runway (as some pilots found out over the years). To increase the chance of a successful landing they filled in the ditches on either side of the highway and cut down the corn in the field across the road to allow for an overrun. Too low and the plane would hit the face of the cliff, too high and it would summersault into the farm field. They were able to land this huge transport plane on the runway without incident somehow. One could buy the VHS videotape of the landing for $29.95 at the giftshops in the hotel and on the aircraft itself back then. For those too cheap to pay for it they played in on a loop in the coffee shop in the airplane. The plane remains to this day on static display in front of the hotel but the airstrip closed years ago. You can view the landing on YouTube at
On the flight back after lunch I realized we were going to fly over Lake Geneva, so I asked Dad to fly over the area around that tower. Now I could finally see how one would get to it. We got to the area, located the tower and I shot some pictures with my trusty old Argus C3, these showed that the tower was accessed by the gated driveway leading to the home off the highway, thru the yard, past the barn and then thru the field out back. Mystery Solved!
So now we jump back in time to our original hunt 5 years before. We found we could see the tower from Highways 50 and 67 but never imagined it would be accessed by some guy’s driveway. We decided to do some real research. We went to the county seat in Elkhorn, just up the road and asked for the County Engineer. We told him what we wanted, and he came up with the topographical maps of the area. We poured over them but, while they confirmed the location of the tower, they didn’t show how one would get to it. What the map did show however was a “Military Base” adjacent to it. Our friendly engineer told us that it had been a radar emplacement during WW2 but was now the site of an industrial park.
What was really interesting about this old military base/current industrial park was that in the center was a high point indicated on the map, labeled “Radar Antenna”. Our new friend made a couple copies of the maps and we went back to the area. We found the entrance to the facility off WI-67 north of WI-50 and followed the access road in. We could see the obvious barracks buildings from its old military days along with some newer buildings used by the various businesses there. We followed the road around and it led to a round concrete pad that was about 30 feet in diameter. This was apparently the radar antenna’s location back in the day. It was, of course, the highest spot around.
As we were parked there, we could see the tower we were looking for but were no closer to finding it’s access road. We drove all over the facility to no avail. We did however discover that the area was a great place for receiving all kinds of stuff on the radios. We could hear our local GMRS repeaters from the Chicago area full scale, same for 2M and 440 ham repeaters, even our police repeater on 470 MHz. I had a work radio in my vehicle (I was “the radio guy” after all) and Matt asked for a radio check with his dispatcher, the two agencies we worked for were on the same repeater. The dispatcher said we were loud and clear and hitting 4 of the 10 satellite receivers.
Now we were more intrigued than ever. We tried some simplex work. We called a friend who was at home, and he was able to hear us on our 2M simplex frequency. We could hear almost all the Chicago PD Zone and Citywide (460 MHz.) repeaters when they weren’t being drowned out mt Milwaukee, Peoria or Iowa. We were hearing stuff from all directions. It was the Midwest version of Mountain Topping, about 1200 feet ASL Chicago averages around 500 feet, so this is, relatively speaking, a really high spot.
Now if anyone here has been at the top of Sears Tower, the Empire State Building etc. with a radio you would know how crazy the reception can be at such an elevated spot. The neat thing about this spot was that we were in a relatively RF-quiet area, so the noise floor was much lower. This allowed much better reception of distant signals from all directions. We were hearing VHF and UHF stuff from all over norther Illinois, southern Wisconsin, even into Michigan, Iowa and Minesota.
We spent the rest of the afternoon there and christened it as “Radio Hill” We would come back and visit often. If there was a band opening, or even better, a temperature inversion, we would scoot up there to see what we could find. Occasionally we would be there during low-band skip events, low-band was still popular then.
As far as I know the place is still there, but it has been decades since I have been there. Matt still lives in the area but sold the condo years ago. While we never were able to find the base of the tower that started this hunt it found for us something even better. The hours we spent there playing radio over the years were as much fun as a scanner guy could have with clothes on. We never had any problem with any of the tenants of the business park. It was mostly the province of car and boat repair and storage as well as a whole lot of junk, these guys probably never noticed or cared about a couple guys sitting in a car. At least we were in the front seat. I looked at it on Google Earth tonight and it doesn’t seem to have changed much in the 40 years since we discovered it.
Over the years I have done some real mountain-topping on real mountains, like Pike’s Peak, some places along highways in Wyoming that went above 10,000 feet and some places in the Dakotas and Nevada. I talked to a guy in Dodge City Kansas on 146.520 from Pike’s Peak when the wife and I were there a few years back. From the Sears Tower we would routinely talk back to Winnetka or Glencoe on simplex with 4-watt HT’s, some 25 miles away. I plan on getting involved with POTA and SOTA so maybe that will revive my mountain-topping interest.
