4Gs

I blogged halfway and realize that this is a very lame back story of my NS days. Hahaha… So be mentally prepared for an old man’s recount of his NS experience. Hur hur~

National Service, the Beginning

My national service vocation involved me handling VSAT sations. Here’s an explanation of what VSAT is from Wikipedia:

A Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT), is a two-way satellite ground station with a dish antenna that is smaller than 3 meters. Most VSAT antennas range from 75 cm to 1.2 m. VSATs access satellites in geosynchronous orbit to relay data from small remote earth stations (terminals) to other terminals (in mesh configurations) or master earth station “hubs” (in star configurations).

Each VSAT station is a complete communication station, fully furnished with equipment to support a operation centre anywhere. It was considered cutting edge to the Army and I was very lucky to be one of the pioneer users/operators of the equipment.

The technology and networking nature of the VSAT stations attracted the engineering side of me that I never knew existed (back then). I engulfed all the teaching materials available and even digested thick operation manuals. Seniors, engineers from DSTA and STEE, and past users of the equipment shared their experiences and soon enough, I accumulated an exclusive mixture of information regarding the different stations.

Operating the stations wasn’t an easy task. It was not physically demanding but it required the users to be very knowledgeable about the entire system, from the hardware connections to how the software worked. There were multiple points of failure that could cause communication between two stations to fail and the operator had to know how to troubleshoot and identify the fault. My company used to rely heavily on the DSTA and STEE engineers to troubleshoot during military exercises. It was a serious problem because there were limited number of engineers and much time were always wasted waiting for the engineers to arrive on-site to troubleshoot. But with enough 偷师s from the engineers, I could do all the troubleshooting myself and the engineers even gave me the rights to do any modification to the stations whenever I needed to.

The Birth of the Gs

Then came in Ryan and Kok Wee. Both of my age but were enlisted three months later than me. I was tasked to share my knowledge with them and they became my official understudy. It was amazing that we could click together and it was a great experience sharing whatever I knew with them. Within a few weeks, they became proficient enough to operate the stations themselves and even expanded our knowledge about the stations through their separate interactions with the engineers. We soon became the three power houses of our company.

I had a peculiar habit of shouting “I’m a GENIUS~!” and laugh like 蜡笔小新 whenever I could identify the fault in the stations. (In my defense, the troubleshooting process was very tedious and I need to motivate myself constantly. And I was heavily influenced by all the 蜡笔小新 VCD screenings in our bunks during our free time.) If Kok Wee were to be by my side, he would agree and say “Ya, you are a G…” Hmm… Then then label “G” stuck, probably because I called myself a genius too many times. But since I saw all three of us as having equally strong knowledge of the VSAT stations, I thought we three should share the label, and the 3Gs was formed.

Hahaha… Super lame and bo liao~

Achievements of the 3Gs

Our proficiency was no joke. We were always usually deployed to critical stations during military exercises to make sure a constant up-time. One memorable exercise was being deployed to MINDEAF (sic) to maintain communication link with deployments in Indonesia(?) during the Indonesian Tsunami incident. Kok Wee and myself even developed and conducted courses for all incoming juniors to bring their proficiency to our standard. 哇～回想起那时风光的日子～

4th G

Knowing that retention of knowledge within the Army is poor due to NSFs ORD-ing and the fact that there wasn’t a very complete documentation of all my knowledge, I was quite eager to find a successor before I left my company. It was almost nine months after Ryan and Kok Wee joined the company that another potential G came joining us. Excited to finally found someone to replace me, I had two other Gs with me to coach him. We even gave him the label of a G without any explanation to what G represented. (It was only recently that Ryan admitted he didn’t know what G represented as well…)

Story has it that the G legacy didn’t really continue after the 4Gs left the company. It was regretful that we couldn’t find anyone who had the flair for engineering/technology/networking stuffs. The Army also dumbed down the operating process by replacing the task of troubleshooting to (a not so satisfactory) software with basic artificial intelligence (which I played a part in developing as a contract staff in STEE, but that’s another story…)

But nevertheless, I believe all of us would agree that we had a very satisfactory National Service experience and we shared a unique bond. It’s quite funny recounting the experiences over dinner, years after we’ve parted and embarked on different paths.