Anyone else see them driving around? Not all that common around here, so always cool to see.
Always have thought microwave horn antennas look cool/weird
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This particular site is part of the AT&T long lines tower network.
Interested in antenna's. Do we have ham operators hanging out on BITOG ?
There is a tower just west of Dubuque, Iowa that looks like that that has an AT&T sign at it. I don't think they are used anymore. The one at Dubuque has all the wave guides from the array to the control building removed. There are several microwave towers around here that are unused now.
My best buddy today at 7am after taking oldest nephew to his stop. We did the “2.5 mile loop”. He doesn’t ever wear out. Part basset bound/beagle. 9 years old.
Bi can't remember the website but a guy has a website devoted to where these are.
Cool looks like part lab as well.
Most of the microwave towers of the 70s are no longer in use for long line transmission. Because fiber has thousands or millions of times the available bandwidth, microwave is mostly obsolete. You'll see cellular equipment on many that are still standing.
Me. KE8ORH. I will admit I’m not active anymore really.
The AT&T Long Lines network is a rabbit hole of research you may find yourself enjoying.
It's obsolete, so the only horns remaining haven't been in anybody's way to create motivation to remove them.
I remember seeing them "everywhere" in the 80s, they had a nice gnarly cold war vibe to them. And they should have; they were subsidized by the government to allow nuke-proof communications. The buildings and support stuctures for them were hardened, had generators etc.
When someone says we should give telcos money for cheap internet or whatever, I like to point out that we already did.
It's obsolete, so the only horns remaining haven't been in anybody's way to create motivation to remove them.
I remember seeing them "everywhere" in the 80s, they had a nice gnarly cold war vibe to them. And they should have; they were subsidized by the government to allow nuke-proof communications. The buildings and support stuctures for them were hardened, had generators etc.
When someone says we should give telcos money for cheap internet or whatever, I like to point out that we already did.
Years ago, when I flew RC airplanes, there was a narrow beam that went by a RC runway our club used. If you flew through it when it was on all the controls of your airplane would go to some position you had not told them to. The airplane would basically act like it was out of control, which it was, but after it flew through, or fell out of that narrow beam you had control again, though you may have to get the airplane to recover from then being in a bad flight angle, additude. But it was high enough that any decent flyer could recover before crashing. Still, it did cause a few beginners to crash. Some experienced flyers flew through it on purpose just for the random recovery challenge.
This is very correct and very well documented by Bell Labs. I found a book at work that someone who retired had in their desk, it described the reasons the government wanted the communication systems built to survive a nuclear war. The specs said that the systems had to be able to survive a nuclear detonation a certain distance way. There were several such specs, 2 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles, so many megatons, so much over pressure, etc. It was very interesting.
Don't forget that almost the entire system is obsoleted ever few years because of the demand for bandwidth. Those upgrades are incredibly expensive. Even the fiber in the ground from 20 years ago is obsolete and needs to be replaced.
When I was a kid we lived near Bell Labs Murray Hill New Jersey, 60s-70s. I remember many of those kinds of antennas around. Some where huge.
Some years ago I got dropped into the deep end of the fibre optic pool when our department was tasked with designing a fibre system to replace an aging microwave system.
Good memories for sure.
Yeah the long lines towers are cool. They are a big part of communication history in this country that most people don't know about.
Please give him plenty of ear and belly rubs for me!
My neighborhood when I was a kid had this one, which had an all-concrete base. I couldn't find a view that shows exactly how massive it is.... It is up on a little hill but the Street View camera is such a wide angle it doesn't look quite as impressive. Anyway, when we were kids my dad would take us to the Quickie-Mart where we would get "Icee" drinks and then we'd burn off all that sugar by running around the tower. I used to think the antennas looked like giant chairs. According to satellite photos its been there since at least as far back as 1956.
EDIT: I did some searching and found it was built in 1949.
EDIT: I did some searching and found it was built in 1949.
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Microwave transmission was the precursor to fiber when it came to high speed data transmission
AT&T was very proud of it, but technology eventually gets eclipsed
Most of them are gone around here, but I've seen them still standing in rural NJ
Sometimes the modern descendant AT&T (or other carriers) just repurpose these as cell sites
It's a high and strong metal structure, bolt some antennas to it
AT&T was very proud of it, but technology eventually gets eclipsed
Most of them are gone around here, but I've seen them still standing in rural NJ
Sometimes the modern descendant AT&T (or other carriers) just repurpose these as cell sites
It's a high and strong metal structure, bolt some antennas to it
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According to this video, these transmitters are "more popular than ever" because they can send data faster than fiber optics, which apparently has an impact on how much money can be made by some power players in the stock market.
Everyone else is saying that they are obsolete and are being dismantled.
So, which one is it?
