About
Welcome to ROMAD.COM aka the ROMAD LOCATOR.
The Concept of this site was dreamed up in 1989. I was attempting to amass an inclusive listing of the members of the job. Both past and present. Mostly this was done via a spreadsheet and contained names, phone numbers and some basics about that person. I mailed it out to different Forts and let them make edits and send it back. It was rather hard to keep that list current. With the expansion of the internet and the founding of AOL, my site, at that time hanging on the Compuserve and Delphi networks became much more accessible and more and more people started visiting. When INTERNIC reduced the costs of URLs to below 1000 dollars I went looking for an appropriate one. TACP was taken up (Toshiba American Consumer Products) so I settled on ROMAD. Now with a daily hit rate of about 100,000 folks and over 5 gigabytes of stored images, text and links its considered the focal point for TACP Communications outside of the AF digital domain.
For the Sake of bandwidth savings I have attempted to keep the front sections of the site “lite” and keep the shockwave and snazzy animations to a minimum. Because of the proliferation of highspeed networks and fiberoptic I’m starting to upgrade the system slowly but surely. This front site upgrade to WordPress is but one of the coming features, and hopefully not the last.
Enjoy the site and if you have any questions contact me at charlie@romad.com. Please put ROMAD.COM in the subject as I receive a considerable amount of email per day and my filters are medieval with regards to Spam filtering.
Regards
Charlie Heidal, MSgt (RET)
USAF TACP
AIRBORNE
About Charlie: charlie@romad.com
Joined the AF in 1983 and went to Basic training. I came in with a job guarantee of a Mechanic, but the AF had a bunch of them so I was made into a driver (Or I could have exited because the AF broke its deal…decided to stay). Met a guy in basic called, Brian Brock, who was heading to a job he didn’t know anything about either…275X0, Tactical Air Command and Control Specialist. I did the minimum in the “real” AF and started looking for a way to do something else. Went to CBPO and volunteered for TACP. Went to the course and joined HAWK 18. We started out as a class of 15 but rapidly ended up a class of 4. About 1/2 way through Chief Finn (the Course commandant at the time) told us we would speed up our blocks because we were all NCOs (Waymon Perry, Scott Davis, Paul Gayhart and me) and were easily keeping up with the class flow. We graduated the day after Falcon 18 did.
First duty station was Ft Carson Colorado 1986, where I was reminded of, and found in the drivel book Brian’s ugly mug. At this point I was becoming more and more interested in the History of this careerfield and started amassing as much information as I could. Names of graduates, who was where and who knew what of missions we had participated in in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The more I dug the more holes I found in the history. There were glaring holes in our past. I was supporting the 4th ID DTAC during this assignment.
Camp Casey Korea 1990-1991. 2/72 Armor This is also when the ETAC Pay started.
May 1991, The ROMAD Locator is born on the Compuserve network. The URL is hard to manage until I could afford the 300$ to buy the initial ROMAD.COM domain name. TACP was taken up by Toshiba American Consumer Products.
Ft Drum Ny 1991-1992, 2/87 Infantry with LtCol Eikenberry commanding. My Father was diagnosed with Terminal Cancer at this point and a Humanitarian was flowed down to me from HHQ.
Ft Campbell Ky 1992-1998 Supported the 101st Abn Division Main and worked in the Training Shop. In late 1993, Chris Brewer asked me if I would like to try out for the SF detachment forming. I did and passed. Moved to 5th Special Forces Group supporting 2nd and 3rd battalions. Supported numerous missions that I can talk about in about 100 years. 
1998-2002 Director, JTAC Training at the Joint Fire Power Control Course. We picked up and moved the entire course from Hurlburt Field Florida to Nellis AFB. Supposedly it was to get more sorties. It did give us some, and we did get a very good range to operate from (Leech Lake Training Range at the top of Ft Irwin)
2002-2006 Director of TACP Requirements, Air Combat Command A8 Directorate.
April 2006 - Retired and hired on with a software company in California that writes datalink software as the test department manager
Sept 2006 - Anzus gets bought by Rockwell Collins
April 2007 - Promoted to Principal Engineering Manager over test, software. requirements and pretty much everything else in the building
Sept 2008 - Lateral move to Principal Business Development Manger over Joint Fires and Effects systems and Platforms
Here it is 2009 and ROMAD.COM is still going strong (after 18 years…amazing). The page goes through major rewrites and technology upgrades on a monthly basis with a complete teardown and rebuild every 2-3 years. There is currently 4 gigabytes online and another 15 or so gigabytes offline. Mostly scans of documents and manuals. As I get time and available storage space online these will be posted.
I received a question a while back “So what do you build the page one…”. I have 10 machines running. The main two are:
I7 Processor, 16 gig of ram
30 Gig Solid State boot drive
300 Gig Raptor 10,000 rpm swap file drive
4 Terrabytes of Hdd storage
twin 22″ plasma displays with twin GTX video cards driving them
Server is a 686 with 8 gig of ram
2 Raid 5 Arrays with a single crappy display on top.
Fiberoptic and 1000 ethernet run through out the house.
The place looks like a parts hell most of the time but its where I spend a majority of my time….unless I’m out zipping down the road in my 350Z, but it has a computer system in it too. Netstumbler baby!
