Location from remembrance-of-earths-past by
A top-secret radio observatory disguised as a missile-defense test on Radar Peak in the Greater Khingan Mountains — the antenna from which Ye Wenjie sent humanity's first reply to an alien transmission, in violation of every protocol and every commandment.
Red Coast smells of solder and pine-needle smoke and the cheap unfiltered cigarettes everyone here smokes against the cold. The hum of the transmitter is a permanent low note in every room. Personnel are not permitted to leave the ridge. Letters home are read. Ye Wenjie chose it as the location for what she did because no one was ever supposed to come here, and because the mountain made a beautiful shield against the politics below.
A windswept ridge in northeast China, half a kilometer of bare granite at the spine, crowned by a single enormous parabolic dish like a steel ear pointed at the sky. Below the dish, a cluster of low concrete buildings painted military gray-green: barracks, comms rooms, a generator house. A double perimeter of barbed wire. In winter the wind never stops. In summer the bog at the base of the ridge breathes mosquitoes.