If you’ve ever been to Baguio and looked around at the surrounding mountains, then I’m sure you have already seen the Mickey-Mouse ears pair of radar dishes nestled on a mountain peak to the south of the city. Well, that mountain is called Mt. Cabuyao and those dishes are for tropospheric scatter communications. These dishes were built by the Americans and was meant to link to a similar site in Taiwan and then to Okinawa.

Mt. Cabuyao is actually just a child peak of the taller Mt. Sto. Tomas whose peak is located about 2.5 kilometers further to the south and 200 meters higher. Mt. Sto. Tomas is the highest peak nearest to Baguio. As such, the peak has tons of TV and radio masts serving Metro Baguio.

Photo from Arcibaldo.

Check out this snippet I took from this web page that talked about the history of those dishes:

As a result we were able to have the Armed Forces of the Philippines acquire the site we selected on Mt. St. Tomas, which we called Cabuyo. The US Army was then allowed to be a tenant on this site. This resulted in a program to improve this link and make improvements in the extension of this system through Taiwan and on to Okinawa. This was known as the Phil-Tai-Oki Troposcatter System. Page Engineers won the contract and they installed two 120-foot troposcatter dishes at Cabuyo.

I thought that these dishes had something to do with the weather, but as mentioned above, they are for communication purposes. Now the question that I haven’t found the answer for is whether this site is still operational. Can anyone enlighten us?

Update: William in the comments said that his former company took over the dishes back in the 70s and as far as he knows, the site is no longer used for communication purposes.

Download KML file (for Google Earth)