What do I need to know to reclass from 13B to 94H?

The photo is of a Division Equipped team with an AN/GSM 287 set. These may or may not be still in the inventory.

TMDE is all about accuracy, repeatability, and traceability. You will be working transfer level. The regions provide secondary reference level, the Primary lab is at Redstone. It goes from USATA to NIST. There are 6-8 of you that support a Division plus. Your team stands an annual US Army TMDE Activity Audit. You have bench test standards that there maybe only be a few literally in the world. Don’t let the magic smoke out. Assume all capacitors are charged. The usual test parameters are physical, DC/Low Frequency, radiological, pressure, optical among others. You are working with electricity from microvolts up to 440V deadly power. TB 43-180 is the critica publicationl. You’ll be calibrating or repairing items then applying DA label 80s when they are verified repaired and calibrated. The sophistication and sensitivity of the calibration or repair is carefully delegated to the right level. The hardest and the most sensitive are at Primary level at Redstone. There are some measurements and parameters that are maintained by Redstone APSL for NIST. The Army calibrates some things for the FAA and NASA.

TMDE is extremely small community. You will go team To team and run into the same 300 people. Your reputation is everything. In 2005 the OD Corps took the team's away from AMC and gave them back to Divisions and Corps. Now they are in Field Maintenance Companies in the Sustainment Brigades. That has had its shrinking pains (not growing pains). It's hard to explain to outsiders how important TMDE is until you lock down a team after an aircraft mishap and another TMDE entity comes and inspects and validates your team's work. It gets ugly. People can be fried over it. God help you if your transfer standards are out of cal or the cal standard procedure was not followed and you slap that DA label 80 on it. Suddenly pulling CQ wasn't that important after all.

Team's are stationed all over the world. When it was a Company, the saying was the sun never sets on the 95th Maintenance Co. team density and locations have morphed a little, but there was two in Germany, one in Italy, two at drum, two at Stewart, one at Bragg, one in Hawaii, one at Carson, two at Hood, two at Campbell, one at JBLM, one at Riley, and four in Korea off the top of my head. There were at least two in the ARNG. There were two enduring TDY missions in Qatar and Kuwait that soldiers rotated to. There was one in Bosnia but it stopped around 2001. Then Iraq and Afghanistan came, half the unit was forward deployed along with the Co HQ, with the remainder preparing for deployment in rotation.

There are a handful of nominative assignments in WHCA, Bethesda Medical (now Walter Reed), branch proponent office, and tHe school house. Otherwise you'll go to the places above over and over. When you ETS, the military is about the only source of Calibration expertise whether it is USMC, AF PMEL, Navy, or Army TMDE. The AIT is Joint. Some of your PME will be Joint.

When I was Active, we were 35H. We were separate from the local command but attached. We troubleshot and repaired to the component level, resistor, capacitor, transistor, etc;. I think currently for Active members it's mostly black box stuff. The real work is done by GS and WG civilians. I enjoyed my time, it was a challenge.

All the electronic portions are self paced.... to a certain extent. This portion is done through computer based training (CBT) with a few facilitator in the classroom with you. Just pay close attention and try to get ahead on your training so you can earn certificates in other training while you wait for the rest of your class to catch up. This other training includes A+, Security +, FCC license etc. The equipment repair portion will be taught somewhere else. Again, pay close attention.

I used to teach the electronic portion of the course when it was at Ft. Gordon. Ft. Lee is a nice place. Know it well and I have lots of friends there plus I also family in Richmond. Good luck