Hershal said:
Keesler is the joint forces school location now.....back in the day.....
Navy had 2 schools for "B & D" (torque wrenches, DMMs etc), and the advanced cal/microwave was at the joint forces school in Denver (Lowry AFB). USMC had a school of their own I think.....Army and Air Force sent their folks to the joint school in Denver, and the AF also had some training (so I have been told) at Keesler even then.
Hershal
I started the program back in 1988 in the AF and we had all branches present. There were also foreign nationals from their respective military and a few contractors as well. Most people went through the entire "basics" courses but if I remember correctly, a few of the branches broke away for some of them and went to "branch" specific courses. This was the case for the actual PMEL portion of the program as well. We went through the first 4-5 courses and then the branches started to break out.
The Navy ran the Physical Dimensional school, all the instructors I had for the Radiac program were AF. I never took the microwave course. I think there was one or two additional programs, but I only went through the "Phys D" and the Radiac courses.
Lowry was a really nice place, plenty of things to see and do in the off-duty hours. If you really want an "experience", there was always Colfax Ave.
When I was my duty station and we went through our audit, we were the #2 PMEL in the world for number of years experience. Number 1 was the PMEL in Iceland I think. Of course, at that time I had only been in 3 yrs, so I was bringing the average down. The Japanese nationals we had in our lab were all real good at what they did.
Overall, it was a good career field and I enjoyed myself.
Wayne