Exploring the cold-war phone system designed to survive a nuclear attack
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- Hidden in plain sight is one of the most important communications networks in the US called AT&T long lines.
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What are AT&T Long Lines?
Before satellites and fiber optics transmitted information across the United States, there was a cold-war era communications network called long lines. It’s a microwave relay network with thousands of towers across the United States each about 40 miles apart.
I got hooked on the Long Lines network after running across some eerily beautiful photographs taken by Spencer Harding. Each truck-sized horn antenna pointed to yet another tower, crisscrossing the US.
The installations were hardened with blast-proof bunkers and were designed to enable critical military communications during a nuclear attack. By design, most are located in remote areas, far from population centers but thousands are still hidden in plain sight.
Were there towers near me? Could I get inside? I had so many questions, so I found an expert named Mike who took me to the Mojave Desert to show me his favorite site.
I hope you enjoy this video. Be warned, you may start googling your way down a rabbit hole like me.
Shout out to my guide Mike and Jack Beyer for the drone footage. Spencer Harding's book inspired this video, thanks for letting me use your images. Find Spencer's work here: spencerjhardin...
Have you noticed these antennas before? Driving by towers will never be the same for me anymore 🙄
I used this system to set up dedicated data links back in the day. The leased lines were actually microwave links between these towers. We would set up a multiplexer (MUX), which was a fancy modem, at each end of the line and build up commercial computer networks using this infrastructure. The system was designed for voice communications, and the bandwidth was pretty low, but if all your information is ASCII, you can build effective computer networks on this technology, and we did.
There is one of these in Downtown Pontic Michigan.
There was a tower not far from me. Discovered it one night driving around and always wanted to know what they were for. Now I know. Very cool.
Of course we did and naturally, civilian long distances utilized these lines. Any thoughts on Autovon?
Did you notice the towers are not in a straight line? They were in sort of a zig zag pattern, so that one tower wouldn't interfere with other nearby towers.
Joined A T & T Long Lines in 1969 at Sweetwater, Texas. Worked on the Dallas to LA route and the Denver to San Antonio Route as a Microwave Technician until fiber optic technology was deployed. I had the task of shutting down most of the Transmitters and Receivers in our area after the traffic was shifted over to the fiber optics. After the final hurrah I then moved over to the fiber optics as a technican. Retired in 2005. What a ride, enjoyed every minute of it.
Did you happen to turn down the Pine Springs site? A buddy and I purchased that place in the late 90's. The site was left perfectly intact.
@bradc5686 Never been to Pine Springs but it was maintained by one of our work groups out of Fairacres. NM. I have a Google Map file with all the main and repeater stations of the Dallas to LA microwave route. Very interesting for me to visually see all the locations.
@bradc5686 btw....did you buy it from American Towers? The entire block of abandoned towers were sold to American Towers and if they didn't want to keep it they listed on their website as for sale. A lot of those towers that were purchased were salvaged for the brass and antennas and then resold.
What part of LA? My grandfather worked for bell and we had some smaller parts from the towers when they decommissioned them. I have a few of those clear plastic Western Electric gauges. He worked a lot of between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
I work in the Oil Field in South Texas. Did you ever service the Towers in Floresville or Ecleto, Tx? The tower in Ecleto is pretty much untouched with all the Horn Antennas. The Tower in Floresville is Massive but looks abandoned.
Let me add a bit to this story. AT&T was asked by Federal Officials to create a backbone of switches and transmission across the country which was "hardened" against nuclear effects and other events. Many switching centers were built underground and were connected by underground cables. A copper sheath covered them and things like toilets were put on springs to absorb shocks. Most equipment was hung on mounting hardware from the ceilings and not attached to the floor so it would swing when pushed. Diesel generators were provided with exceptionally large storage tanks. In general, the buildings were located outside major population centers since they cities were deemed targets.
Here's a point which you can't see from viewing abandoned buildings -- the cost of all these extra construction expenses was paid NOT by the federal government, but everyone who used the AT&T system in the 1950s. AT&T was a telecom monopoly and the regulators deemed those expenses were justified for the overall good of the nation. If this was to happen today, since no telecom company would want to bake in the additional costs (making them economically noncompetitive), the bill to the government would be huge. Instead, your grandparents paid for this by adding a little cost to each call made.
When I was a kid in the1970’s, long distance phone callswere still considered expensive. If you called grandma, who lived only 75 miles away, you planned what you were going to say and signed off quickly. And my oarents were relatively affluent! This was due to the cost of the technology of the day, the fact thatAT&T was a monopoly, and apparently subsidies to the nuclear-hardened network.
Yeah right. Everybody paid out the nose to call someone next town over. Big blue was not cheap. People would die from the fright of ld calls
@@ryhol5417 Yep and now ATT is an end-of-life company hemorrhaging money and destroying their market cap. :(
I've been in one of them before in the early 2000's. Crazy place - go down a hardened stairway to a massive blast door. Once inside it was 3 underground stories but each story was probably 20ft tall. Like you said everything was mounted on springs from the lightbulb on the ceiling, to equipment racks to the toilets. Everything designed to survive a blast. I would have loved to explore the upper two levels but was with an escort to go down to #3 and work. Lots of old school telecom equipment and control panels from decades long gone!
@@MykePagan because intrastate was governed by the state and ATT knew how to manipulate the PUCs. Interstate was regulated by the FEDs who were tougher
Some additional random facts about this fascinating system (I was with the Bell System at the time): Many of these microwave sites are still in use. They were supplanted by a coast-to-coast buried coaxial system (sometimes referred to as L-4) that had thousands of small underground bunkers along their routes that contained repeaters. These were extremely hardened to withstand nuclear blasts and contained several weeks of supplies so they could be manned, including special air filtration for fallout and even a Bell System incinerating toilet! Each of these repeater sites also had radiation detectors which, if triggered, would send a notification so the National Surveillance Center in New Jersey would know where there was a nuclear explosion. The Bell System supply catalog contained thousands of standardized parts they ordered to spec from suppliers, each with its own Bell System part number. They even had Bell System ashtrays! As for these antenna towers, the drawings for their construction anywhere near a likely-target for a nuclear weapon had fully 90% of their height under the surface to help withstand a shock wave knocking it over.
As an electrician I worked in one of these facilities, they are fascinating to go into and still had the radiation suits on the wall. You need to enter through a double door vault type doors system,one needed to be closed before the next open. And no lie The toilets were on springs!!
The inside joke, you were sent there if you were found to be a problem employee that they couldn't get rid of. 2 stories in the ground with no windows!!
I was a technician at that time and did maint. on equipment in many of those sites. You must be younger than me! I remember L-1! I was in my 20s at the time and It was a fabulous gig. We traveled from station to station along the network. The stations were open 24/7 so we could work anytime as hard as we wanted, taking any extra time to be tourists in some of the most beautiful parts of the country. The original hardened system was all underground cables. The microwave towers came much later. The tech was also what facilitated MCI to create their "dial around" network which ultimately broke AT&T strangle hold on the communications.
NONE of these Long Lines microwave repeater sites are in operation today‼️In fact, the terminal microwave equipment in the Central offices was removed many years ago. The “L” coaxial lines were retired even earlier. AT&T tried putting tv network video on the “L” lines but they introduced too much noise in the video feed. The TD-2 microwave routes were much less noisy than the coaxial “L” lines!
Some of the towers now have cellular antennas, but the vast majority are just slowly and steadily deteriorating.
Fiber has replaced all the old TD-2 & 3 routes. Microwave was an analog technology so each repeater station amplified the original signal AND the noise! On the other hand, fiber repeaters aren’t actually repeaters at all. They don’t amplify anything. They actually regenerate an entirely new bitstream of “1’s” and “0’s” that is an exact copy of the original so the next new stream is just as quiet as the original!
Personally, I think AT&T made a mistake shutting down and abandoning the entire network that took so long and so much money to build. Rather than updating some of it to digital and using it for alternate routing (restoration), and protection from nuclear attack, they're putting all their eggs in one basket, that could be wiped out very easily! The people of AT&T today are not thinking like they did 60 years ago. We were more prepared back then than we are now. And the threat is much greater today!
We don't need this system nor any other one the current administration just calls our bad guys on speed dial.....
About 10 years ago I was helping a buddy who bought one. It wasn’t this big, had the horns and fly swatter antennas. The main building looked like Monday’s crew shut the door and never returned. Log sheets were still on wall, the wet cell battery banks was almost dry. It was a true relic.
We had/have several towers in our area near DC. I had many Ham Radio friends who worked for ATT Long Lines.
How much was it?
for how much $ ?
I've had the opportunity to visit many of these and that seems to be the case for most of them; everything basically frozen in place just as it was when they were shuttered in the '80s.
I would love to buy one of these old facilities. Throw a couple wind turbines on the tower and be set
Read some of the comments and here are a few of my own.
Complementing the nation wide microwave network was a nation wide network of coaxial cable, built by AT&T Long Lines, mostly underground, that was originally developed in the mid to late 30's but not deployed until after WW 2. It was called L-carrier and there were 5 variants. The first variant, L-1 operated at 3 MHz and had 600 voice channels on 4 coaxial tubes, and required repeaters every 8 miles.
The last variant, L-5E, developed in the mid 70's had 22 coaxial tubes, operated at 66 MHz and had 13,200 voice channels, and required repeaters ever mile. Only a few L-5E systems were built.
There were two coast to coast L-carrier routes, with many shorter routes connecting major cities, especially on the east coast. This was built as a supplement to the microwave system.
The network was all analog, with thousands and thousands of audio channels, with about 3 kHz of bandwidth each, and used millions of vacuum tubes, and later transistors.
Until the 56k DDS capability was added to the L-carrier system in the 1960's, data that was carried by the L-Carrier system was audio tones that were carried on the audio channels, and converted from and to digital data by modems. Basically what the customer got was a two way audio circuit that was brought into the customer's facility on two phone lines (one channel for transmit and one for receive), but was optimized to carry the audio tones created by the modems.
The multiplexing scheme used single sideband frequency division multiplexing, starting with multiplexing 12 voice channels into a group, then multiplexing 5 groups to a supergroup containing 60 voice channels. 10 of these supergroups could be multiplexed into a master group of 600 channels.
In the late 60's, equipment was designed that could use the bandwidth occupied by an entire supergroup (60 voice channels) to be dedicated to a single 56 kbit/s digital data channel. They thought this was high speed data back in the day!
The L-4 system could multiplex six master groups into a jumbo group for a 3,600 channel system over 20 coaxial tubes
In the early days of network television, TV channels were carried on the L-3 coaxial carrier systems as well, but it did not work as well as microwave as it had too much group delay. I believe one TV channel required the bandwidth of a 600 channel master group.
This same multiplexing scheme was used with the microwave system.
This was proceeded by a network that originally consisted of mostly open wire lines, and on some routes cables consisting of many pairs of thin wires contained in a cable within a lead sheath. Open wire lines are individual copper wires about #6 AWG, or 4 mm in diameter, strung on cross arms mounted on poles.
The early circuits were open wire, but as time went on, some long cable routes were built as far west as Chicago, but most were the open wire lines you sometimes see in old movies. The reason open wire was used instead of cable is because open wire has much less loss than the thin wires used in cables, and needed far fewer repeater amplifiers.
Railroads also ran a lot of open wire along their tracks for their own communications needs.
These wire and cable circuits were made possible by the invention of the vacuum tube which could amplify or "repeat" the signals which would become very weak after about 150 miles of open wire.
There were eventually two open wire routes built by the early 1930's through the sparsely parts of the country west of Chicago, the northern route and the southern route. This was done to increase capacity but also to increase reliability in case of damage to the facilities.
These open wire systems also carried the radio network broadcasts coast to coast and border to border also, at voice frequency, but by the late 1920's a carrier system called C-Carrier was was designed that could impress 3 additional voice channels on an open wire pair at frequencies heterodyned above the voice frequency, for a total of 4 voice frequency channels per pair of wires, and later a carrier system was designed that could impress 12 additional voice channels above the voice frequency. But the radio networks continued to be carried at voice frequency on open wire until well after WW2, when they were eventually put on the coaxial and microwave networks.
Hope this helps. Thanks for reading. You can search if you want more information.
The absolute precision of the analog circuitry that allowed a legible voice call to traverse that many hops through repeaters is AMAZING to me. It's obvious why digital T-carrier took over... but the whole network was built pre-digital, and it WORKED. The entirety of the telephone network was truly the greatest single machine built by humans, with its myriad mechanical moving parts. A guilty pleasure of mine is listening to the series of "Phone Trips" audio recordings of calls placed over the pre-digital telephone network, highlighting the subtle almost-organic sounds that leaked into the audio transmitted across the behemoth Bell System's many parts. The modern internet is, of course, miraculous... but it somehow doesn't feel like as much of a HUMAN accomplishment as giant crossbar central offices and analog carriers forming the huge single network of the 1930s through the 80s.
But satellites, though .... 😅🤣🤣🤪
@@Pants4096 Agreed. I always say - if I had a magic wand and make a change - I'd send us back to late 80s/early 90s as far as internet and telephone. It felt more human, more fun, and more mysterious. Dialing up was an amazing thing that I think we all took for granted. Those moments waiting to connect to the web were great. Making a phone call on a landline was great too. We had a phone in the kitchen with a super long cord because cordless wasn't a priority. Good times.
@@macrominutes yeah I much prefer our internet of today compared to 1200 baud dialup. : ) Heck i remember taking a whole afternoon to download a 5-megabyte photograph. You would literally start the download, and you go about your day. Several hours later when you check on it, you will scream in frustration because someone picked up the phone. yah i'm good. no interest in going back to that time for me.
Very interesting, thank you. I would love a book on this subject. Terrestrial communication throughout the United States has such a great history.
I work for the company that owns these sites now and have been inside a bunch of them. They really are bunkers and built very stout. Some of them still have underground diesel generators and stuff too. The coolest one I have been to is on top of a mountain just south of Salt Lake City, the access road is 7 miles long and is inaccessible during the winter. There is a massive steel helipad that is built off the side of the mountain and the only way they could access the tower during the winter was by air. Don't use the incinerator toilet though, it smells terrible.
That sounds amazing, could I ask you a question about a followup video I am making? www.petemeets.com/contact
You work for AMT?
@@PeteMeets I never got a notification that you replied, sorry about that. If you still have a question just let me know.
@@daveh2612 ATC, yes
@@HardEarnedBacon I’m surprised how many ATC sites they have that have zero tenants. They bought most of them for a song from AT&T but still, property taxes etc. It’s rare to see an LL site that isn’t owned by ATC.
It’s worth noting these towers carried more than phone calls (though that was their main use): the earliest live TV broadcasts, along with live radio, depended on AT&T Long Lines - and their microwave system was the fastest and highest quality way to get a broadcast from coast to coast. Compared to the older Coax cable systems, the capacity was MASSIVE, and upgrading it was as simple as upgrading individual radio pairs-laughably easier than Coax, where you have to replace the entire wire. Only Fiber had greater potential.
The long line was a genius “we done care what it cost” system. You could call Georgia to California and be routed through Canada and never k ow it.
I know a fellow that worked around the long line system. He talked at length about the system and the radios for the presidents plane if in nuclear war. He remembers the stats and all kinds of tidbits that you can’t find on the internet. Going to be a shame when all those guys are gone.
I would love to be introduced to him! I tried really hard to learn more about the old Air Force One comms but the info was really scarce online.
Yes, that would be the nationwide "Echo Foxtrot" 2-way radio communications system that Air Force One and select Long Lines microwave stations across the US were equipped with to communicate back to Washington, designed especially for nuclear war or other times of national distress. Select Long Lines sites were set up as base stations for airborne Echo Foxtrot connections over UHF (I believe in the 400-420 MHz range, reserved for government use in the US), which in turn were landline connected via phone patch to the White House Communications Agency (staffed by Army Signal Corps personnel). The microwave towers at the EF sites had a dedicated UHF antenna mounted on their very top beam to receive Air Force One's downlink.
I believe EF was transmitted unecrypted in the clear using standard narrowband-FM as most commercial 2-way radios do, many police scanner radio and ham radio enthusiasts could receive and listen to EF transmissions whenever Air Force One would be in the vicinity.
Pete, my friend has passed. But I have a buddy in Alabama that knows a Long Line system worker who is just as knowledgeable. How can I make contact with you so we could possibly get you in touch with him?
@@PeteMeets I used to have a slot on my scanner set to 415.7 FM, the air-to-ground downlink of the Echo/Foxtrot system. Whenever Air Force One was within a couple hundred miles it would come alive with Air Force One calling Crown (the White House). I was too far from the nearest tower to hear the ground-to-air, which was supposedly on a frequency around 408 MHz.
My father died a few years ago and was a netwok engineer for a major telecom. All these stories sound familiar. That generation knew SO MUCH. There was no question that could stump them.
In the 1970's and 1980's, I was a Microwave Transmission Engineer that surveyed and planned numerous microwave installations around the U.S. It was a great career until there was a change in technology. Although fiber optics was more expensive and difficult to install (because of the difficulties of getting right of way permission to bury cable, and actually burying cable in rough terrain ), fiber optics had the advantage of much greater bandwidth.
The AT&T system described in this video primarily carried long distance phone traffic (besides military and government traffic).
I heard the technology has had a resurgence in fields like day trading due to its low latency.
At&T/Lucent/Avaya has been in bed with the US Government for a LONG time. Sometimes the relationship got close enough for them to even decide to move in together. Amazing. Why in the world would the NSA and CIA want to share a building with the equipment that handles almost 100% of foreign calls originating and terminating in the US? :)
In all seriousness, for decades any US Navy ship large enough for a dial telephone system had AT&T/Lucent/Avaya equipment. My ship had an AT&T Dimension 2000 PBX system, as did most larger ships. In later years they were replaced with At&T Partner, Merlin Legend, and Definity systems depending on number of stations required. Navy bases had either an AT&T Definity PBX or an actual AT&T xESS Central Office switch. As an added benefit, the Definity and xESS systems had the ability to automatically and seamlessly route trunk-to-trunk calls. AUTOVON node anyone?
Due to special relationships and special pricing, AT&T/Lucent/Avaya equipment is still the "Go To" provider of PBX equipment for all levels of government...Local/county/state/federal.
As far as "AT&T/Lucent/Avaya" goes, in the beginning there was AT&T. AT&T split in 1996, with the new computer/phone equipment branch becoming Lucent. When Lucent became too large, the Business Systems side was spun off in 2000, becoming Avaya. From my point of view, the only real difference has been the branding on the new equipment and the logo on the empty boxes that I pile in the corner. For a lot of common boards, I can pull a brand new Avaya TN board out of its home in a new Avaya G650 carrier and install it in an AT&T Definity G3 that I installed in the 90's, with every expectation that the Definity will recognize the board and place it in service. The reverse also holds true.
Another thing that often happened when laying the initial fiber-optic lines: they often put in a lot more fibers than they needed at first, as the cost of laying several dozen fibers wasn't much more than laying a few down, the main cost driver being the labor to install the lines. As they needed more bandwidth, they just lit up another fiber or two.
@@drtidrow I have never had to tell a customer that they had too many fibers, too many copper pairs, too many conduits, or that the conduits were too large.
I've also never had to tell a customer that they had too much backboard space, too much rack space, too many power receptacles, too much slack management, too much UPS capacity, too much A/C capacity, or too many ports available on the phone/data equipment.
To the point of the original post, the first buried conduit is expensive. Once the expensive ditch is dug, PVC conduit and a few cans of primer and glue are cheap in comparison. Throw in a few extra conduits while the ditch is open.
I used to work for a competitor to Bell Canada which was called CN Telecommunications, then CNCP Telecommunications, then Unitel. I worked with everything from the old teletype lines, to microwave, to fibre. These days fibre provides incredibly cheap bandwidth, compared to the old system, to the point the telecom companies are now running in only fibre and moving away from copper.
My mother maintained the antennas in South Carolina for years. I would often have to sleep in them while my mother dealt with things at night. I even helped switch cards out in the large banks of electronics. I miss the blinking LEDs and the sounds of fans and relays.
Wow, that’s really interesting! Do you remember what site or sites your mother maintained??
Used the swiss cold war version built by Hasler during the coldwar period. Since all phonelines are underground anyways it was virtually indestructible and tamper proof and could run on its own power. The mechanical switches were beautifully engineered.
It's a bit different crossing the U.S. or Canada with cable back in those days. Microwaves were used to cover the distances involved. Switzerland is nowhere near as big.
@@James_Knott Luckily Switzerland has easy soil for digging the phone lines in......
It struck me when he said something about needing all the space for the equipment and now it fits all in a closet somewhere. Reminded me of the time my friend took me to a phone switch building and there was this huge room, about 100 square meters or more. The room used to be full of equipment. Now there are two server racks that do everything the whole room used to do plus internet.
There are TH-cam videos made from Bell training films for repair technicians. My favorite is the one for "Step by Step" relays in the central offices. It shows what happens when you dial a number on a dial phone. Sometimes in old movies or TV shows like "Dragnet" they would show what was involved when a phone number needed to be traced quickly. Like if someone was threatening to kill themselves.
One of our broadcast transmitters was housed in a decommissioned one outside of Bakersfield on Mt. Breckenridge. There was a sign by the exit - "Please keep the door closed to keep the rattlesnakes out."
Not to mention black widow spiders and scorpions. Ahh, Cali!
Man I don't know what it is about the long lines towers... but something about them is so surreal and creepy. Probably because of their original purpose, but also the remoteness, abandonment, and claw-like antenna design. Nostalgia too.
Like there could be beings living in them someday
Ahh, the good old ATT microwave long lines! Brings back memories from my early data comm days. We had lots of 9.6K analog links running around the country. You could track the sun by the outages in the spring and fall caused by "carrier fade". This was due to the wide temp swings during sunrise and sunset. Was a problem for an hour or so then would clear every time on it's own. Became much less of a problem when the switch over to 56K DDS circuits became available, same microwave system but much better error recovery.
its own.
One thing you missed is that many of these sites are still active. The microwave technology has been deactivated and replaced with fiber but still for the same communication reasons that these sites were intended for. Fiber optic can travel farther distances than these microwave towers. So the active sites are farther apart and many of the in-between sites have been abandoned and sold off. The AT&t long line team still exist and they still maintain and protect the network All over the United States and across the oceans.
Very cool! I was able to tour around the inside once on a site survey for a previous employer. It’s dirty, dusty, mostly empty, and dark. Some of the outside doors were welded shut to simplify security. But it sure is a cool site.
We were hoping that we wild catch a worker up there who would let us in. It’s too bad that all the old equipment is gone, I’d love to see it.
@@PeteMeets I think it was Verizon and Sprint in there. They don’t visit very often.
@@PeteMeets While many of these sites are still "active" - just not for long-lines, it's very rare for anyone to have a reason to be there. The stuff doesn't break or need to be touched very often. If you can find any of the smaller clients, you might be able to get one to provide a tour. From what I've seen (other YT'ers), there's not much left to see in there anymore. None of the old long-lines kit is still there. Maybe an old generator is still in there -- too much trouble to drag it out. (I'm surprised all the horns are still there. That's a lot of AL that could be recycled.)
I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to see all of the Telcom equipment in the 70's and 80s before it all got retired. It was amazingly massive, with bay after bay from floor to ceiling! In rows and rows.
I’ve been inside two of these facilities as a field service engineer. All the fun stuff was decommissioned ages ago with maybe 20% of the floor space now occupied with modern gear. I can only imagine what they looked and sounded like in their hay days.
heyday
The amount of software behind this was staggering too. That software allowed us to route around any failure at all. If there was a physical way to make a connection it would work. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and even deep into the 1990s that software continued to improve to reduce both cost and reliability in both catastrophic situations and also general faults. Look at what happened on Jan 15, 1990. A serious bug caused massive failures but the system still managed to make even more successful calls than a regular day. Netflix "created" chaos engineering but similar concepts existed in Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s.
That's super interesting, would you be open to a quick chat? petemeets.com/contact
The majority of class-4 switches in the Bell System during the 1950s and 1960s used purely electro-mechanical relay systems switches, such as the Crossbar Tandem (XBT) variant of the Number One Crossbar Switching System, or 1XB switch. The Number 4 Crossbar ("4XB") tandem switch was used in the North American toll network from 1943 until the 1990s, when it was replaced by more modern digital switching equipment, such as the Lucent 4ESS switch or the Nortel DMS-200.[3] The last 4XB switch in the United States was installed in 1976
The first 4ESS which eventually replaced all class 4 switches in the AT&T network was introduced in Chicago in January of 1976. The 4ESS was a completely all digital switch although some of the peripherals were used to convert analog trunks and lines to the digital network formats. Every single year a new generic (Bell Labs called software versions generics) was introduced to upgrade and improve the software algorithms and reliability. Every single year hardware upgrades occurred that enhanced the system by adding new capabilities. Every single year the hardware and physical footprint of the system got smaller and smaller. In 1985 when I first joined Bell Labs ISDN was starting to be deployed to some high end customers. A 3B20D auxiliary processor was added a few years prior to 1985. Everything was upgraded at one point in time. Several types of out of band signalling such as CCS7 and CCITT 7 were added over time to improve the speed and reliability. New algorithms made routing better and faster. The 4ESS was also used as tandems by a number of the regional Bell Operating companies. The voice trunks used by the 4ESS were passed through microwave such as the network in this video, satellite, copper, and fiber. A version of the 4ESS exists to this day.
Yup, staggering is correct. I contributed to that as an AT&T software engineer in the 80s and 90s. I take no credit for that 1990 bug but remember the day well - everyone's pagers were going off nearly non-stop.
The 4ESS's (and later 5E's) were incredibly complex as was the MACOSS software that kept them doing their thing. I knew people who understood large portions of the system, but my peers and I joked (?) that there was probably no single person who understood the whole thing. The 4E's themselves were huge. I saw one once in a very large sub-basement of an AT&T building. Despite being all digital, is was loud mainly due to all the cooling fans.
Working at AT&T and with Bell Labs engineers was quite interesting!
As a retired AT&T Special Services tech, I can say that the general public has hardly a tiny inkling of all the weird infrastructure we had (have) out there. I recall being under a major city in a side tunnel between buildings that nobody thought were connected at all and spotting gear even I had no idea what it was and the placard stated that my group maintained it!
the classic tech expirience
As I kid I used to imagine and dream of mysterious buildings in the middle of nowhere and caverns deep underground, odd folk would be tinkering with unusual electronic devices at all hours of the day keeping the phones and tv alive. Then I became a tech and realized it was very much as I had imagined it.
I've heard we have tunnels that go from CA all the way to NORAD. Probably have them all over the country.
My dad worked on those sites in southern Oregon for 35 years until he retired. They were remote and not manned. My dad would often get called out in the middle of the night because something had failed. After they changed from vacuum tubes to solid state he would get called out less. I often would go with him on the callouts in 4x4 vehicles and Sno-Cats in the winter. He also worked on the Autovon (which was a 4 wire phone service) and Echo Fox.
I worked at a facility like this one, but smaller, just out of town inLodi California. The building had no windows, and was pressurized slightly to discourage the outside dust from the surrounding agricultural area, and a commercial nursery from making its way inside. It also had an underground cable vault and another room that was used as a lunch room. The name Autovon sounds familiar to me, so I guess we had that. I, along with others did installation work for Western Electric in that location.
LODICA02!
I’ve worked in one of these from the Cold War. It had decontamination showers at the entrance and a room that was still stocked with Geiger counters and dosimeters that were labeled with some kind of civil defense logo.
today, AT&T's system is down, and TH-cam serves me this video.
Super funny that this is recommended to me after ATT going down yesterday
Would love to see inside one of these facilities!
I got to work on one doing a project for AT&T wireless about 15 or so years ago. It was wild not like the typical locations we would work although I have been to some pretty unique places. This particular location was about a hour from NYC off of I-95 in Connecticut. So we get there and go through the gates. There is a large orange and white striped tower with the old horn dish microwave antennas. We pulled up next to the only structure we had seen which looked like some sort of shed and that seemed strange as hell but whatever. We took a look for more info on our computer and we had no more information on where our equipment was located. So we jump out and look around and it makes no sense this small shed that we had no access to. They must have had some cameras around because the shed door opens and we get greeted by a armed security guard at the top of stairs. We were already taken back because we had no idea the shed proceeded underground. The guard was very nice and escorted me and my partner to the 7th or 8th floor on the cargo elevator. The floor we arrived on was mostly filled with switching equipment but everything was very secure and decided by security doors and card locks. The area we went to was just a small room with our mobile BTS equipment inside. I looked around though on that floor and everything was on or hanging from large industrial springs and looked very dated. I realized how special this place was! It was amazing and nostalgic to say the least. This place was so inconspicuous from the surface people have no idea what exists there.
That is an amazing story! Like out of James Bond. Thanks for sharing!
AT&T Long Lines first cross-county connection (NYC to San Francisco) was completed in 1948.
Carried early United Nations meeting in San Francisco.
Chicago to Omaha section closely follows US 6/Interstate 80.
In 1980s, while in Graduate College at Iowa - met the AT&T Fiber Optic crews laying out its replacement.
I assume you mean the the program network for television. The first coast to coast network was completed decades before with open line and later by buried coax cable.
K4XBC
@@tripplefives1402 Not coax on microwave antennas, but waveguide. It's a copper tube with a little air pressure to keep moisture out. It's nice copper so it disappears even from active microwave sites.
Coax cables were also used for L carrier toll systems.
BTW, the first transcontinental telephone line was completed in 1915! When the telephone repeater was first invented. The facility was open wire. That's all there was for 60 years before coax cable and later microwave radio.
@@Joshie2256 Still co-axial, no?
I love Spencer Harding's photos of these towers
Thanks for sharing this! Such a cool engineering project.
so glad you and Mike got to meet, he's so much more knowledgeable on the tech side of the system. I was better at trespassing, glad y'all avoided that hah.
As an alum of Andrew, I have to say that microwave with the red flash is just as beautiful as the old horn. But also an alum of Bell Labs I can’t believe I had never heard of Autovon. For that and the whole tour - thank you gents.
I’m not old enough to have installed these but I’ve decommissioned a few in my tower climbing career. I was always fascinated with the older technology on site. I always loved a good mountain site because they usually had plenty of old tech.
Awesome, there’s a tower in downtown Savannah on Drayton and Anderson.
From someone who works on the towers, these have always intrigued me. Having taken several down you can appreciate the engineering they put into them. Some of the widest towers I've been on and the coolest rigging.
This exactly what i wanted, thank you for the information!!
Hope you get the chance to go inside one (even an abandoned one)
I'd like to clarify something. Before 1984 all toll facilities in California and Nevada were owned and operated by Pacific Telephone and Nevada Bell. After the break up of the Bell System, AT&T Long Lines aquired all of toll facilities nationwide. My dad was working for PT&T and then on 1/1/84, he was suddenly working for AT&T! Another clarification, the Long Lines division of the Bell System was started clear back in 1911, when the need for long distance service was realized. The only facilities back then was open wire lines, coax cable and microwave radio wouldn't come along until the 40's and 50's.
There's a repurposed Long Line tower at Evangola State Park in Evans, NY. Over the last 20 years the horns had taken damage, then were removed and replaced with cellular arrays. The tower itself is has a nice patina but still stands strong. Up until this video, I never really knew what they were. I knew they were microwave but wasn't aware of that they did. Thanks for this video!
Downtown San Bernardino, CA had these on top of an old AT&T building with no windows. Probably one of the tallest and widest buildings in that part of the city. I never knew what those antennas were for until this video and I've lived there my whole life. They were actually taken down about 3-4 years ago.
That building is a Switch facility for POT's - plain old telephone's, Lines for the Riverside area come and go from that building. If you look around GTE and others built plane brick buildings allover Southern CA - they are all switches for old copper lines - literally thousands of relays in those buildings (tens of thousands in that AT&T building) Microwave on top is for backup or other uses. That building is Not considered hardened at all. BTW all these switch buildings are being abandoned mostly as Fiber is taking over.
Ever seen the tower on top of arrowhead? The bunker at strawberry peak is another one. Pretty cool.
My dad worked in that San Bernardino office in the 60's and 70's. Back then it was a reagonal toll center. Toll circuit test boards, L and N carrier equipment, signaling equip, etc on the first floor. 4A toll crossbar switching equipment on the 2nd and 3rd floors. And microwave radio equipment on the 4th floor. I'd been in every part of that building. All of that old equipment is gone know, including the antenna tower, which I used to stand next to. It made me sad walking through an almost empty building the last time I was there. But I remember all those thousands of relays clicking away!
I've been in Turquoise station a good number of times(and others), I installed the original VZW(may have still been airtouch) cell in the late 90s when the sites got sold to American Tower . It's one main floor at ground level(those double doors facing the drive up) there's a smaller upstairs area where the Autovon stuff was and the basement is the footprint of the taller portion of the building. DC plant/batteries were down there and the generators on the side facing the tower. It's funny, the one cell in there tucked in the corner near the tower with the plastic curtains you see in in big freezer doorways and a big mostly empty and dark room. The old fluorescents are barely working, many of them dead or flickering. One of the cool sights is the big status panel with a bunch of frosted plastic or whatever indicators for the various building systems. You can tell it's been broken into a few times, copper thieves. It has a full sized freight elevator to the basement right by the double doors, disabled though and the doors screwed shut. By the door there's asbestos warnings and an old asbestos survey report with alarmingly large numbers, though I don't know what's acceptable. Another stairway leads down to a shelter area, looks like a 50's break room but lots of cabinets, presumably for supplies. As far as I could tell, that area and the rest of the basement weren't connected/accessible from there.
It's been a couple years since I've been in there but the tower has gotten worse, the cornucopia dishes were just wobbling in the wind but still in place, waveguide long gone. That one laying over wasn't like that. The cages around the missing waveguide were swinging in the breeze and several were on the ground on the shotcrete below the tower, a little mangled from the fall. Keep your distance from that tower, all those pieces are heavy.
I've only been to a couple of the LL sites that shot to Turquoise, Kelso is just a concrete husk but the Tower is still in use, Much smaller building. Ibex is a squat little tower and a smaller building, other than the space cleared for cell equipment, most of the old stuff is still there untouched with the decom tags from when they were shut off in 91/92. Much like the one above Lucerne Valley, pretty much identical set up to Ibex.
I've seen many of those microwave stations across the Mojave desert. Lucerne, Bess, Hector,Kelso,Cima,Sheep Hole, Granite Pass...Ibex was a relay between Turquoise and Owlshead, which was so remote, and no power lines. The power generator engine ran 24/7!
@@itz_mxxri you mean Owlshead was on generator right? AFAIK it’s an empty shell and has been for years. I know it’s way out there but never been, I heard stories from the trucking company that hauled the equipment out, it sounds like a trek... Ibex is on commercial power it’s just right off the road. I’ve been to Kelso but not inside the long lines site building. Last I was there is was dead as a door nail but the tower was in use. I helped install the VZW in Lucerne as well. Most of the old stuff is in there too, we just cleared the space we needed, that was just before AT&T sold all of them off to ATC. The route from the Lucerne side was washed out or something last I went up there, the trail was blocked off by the forest service. The way in from west is a lot longer.
@@itz_mxxri there’s still a few sites out off the 40 that are generator powered. At least one solar. One nice thing about that is the roads are reasonably maintained. Not paved or anything but not rutted all to hell.
@davewood406, My dad worked for PT&T in the 60's and 70's, and AT&T in the 80s, in the San Bernardino toll office. He serviced many of these old microwave and L carrier repeater stations all over the desert. Yes, Owlshead was on generator all the time! Most all of these repeater stations were unmanned. They were scanned remotely, and trouble alarms were sent to the main toll office on what was called the C-1 bay. It was all so fascinating back in those days! I was sad to see it all go.
So i showed this to my dad. He worked for Collins Radio eventually Rockwell then went to work for Andrews that had the red lightning bolt looking icon on their towers, horns whatever. I was hoping to get a little more information from him but hes up there in age.
He smiled and laughed, "yeah i installed stuff like that".
Back in the day, these towers also distributed network television programming to the local TV stations. They would often mount a dish lower down and offload the signal to a TV tower in the area. Not only fiber and the need for greater bandwidth killed them off, but equal access as well. The towers were atop large multi-story AT&T/Local Bell (and sometime Independents) buildings and smaller buildings in quieter towns. Those switching offices were classified as either Class 4 Toll, Class 3 Primary, Class 2 Sectional, or Class 1 Regional. These switching offices were interconnected by intertoll trunks carried over these microwave paths. Long distance trunking carried the bulk of the traffic. As well, there was "data" in those days such as special service circuits, private lines, teletype, radio networks....all those NFL and college football games we enjoyed - rode over the long lines network. These towers were also found in very remote above and below the ground AUTOVON sites which served the Military through their own stand-alone voice network. With the advent of fiber, deregulation and equal access, the functions of the CLASS 1, 2, and 3 switching centers went with the wind in the '80s and early '90s. The buildings were vacated and sat dormant for years. Many in those cities have been sold off to house data centers. Most of the towers that were situated between switching offices (repeater sites) were sold off to American Tower, who dismantled the waveguides, in some cases removed the horns and presently lease space on the structures to mount cell antennas. The last functioning Long Lines route I'm aware of was recently decommissioned between Montgomery and Dothan, Alabama. In recent years AT&T has been removing the towers from the buildings they own.
I heard that there were some still functioning in Wisconsin. My goal is to make a followup video with a tour of a site that still has the equipment inside. If there is any way that you could help I’d love to chat. www.petemeets.com/contact
Do you have any info on Long Lines in Vermont? I remember in the early 70s, a tower in Charlotte, VT. It had several vertical waveguides and top-mounted horn dishes. It was HUGE! I drove to the base and looked UP....the scale was unbelievable. I heard from an ex Bell employee, that the tower was that tall to get over one obstruction between Charlotte and the office in Plattsburgh, NY across Lake Champlain. There is a much shorter tower with conventional sticks and cell arrays in what I remember to be the old site. I always wondered what the old height was...
Thanks, really enjoy your videos.
When I got out of the Marine Corps in 1968 I went to one of those underground AT&T facilities to apply for a job. They gave me a tour of the place and said that it was built on super-size springs to absorb the shock of a nuclear bomb. They had enough water and food for everyone in the facility to survive for 2 years.
Those huge horns are just reflectors. At the bottom of the tower is the actual antenna that radiates to the bottom of the cone and the radio waves are reflected to and from the next site down to the antenna feed horn. Old tech but very robust!!!
In the UK we had something similar but predominantly on tall round concrete towers. The towers still exist to carry other communications but they lost their microwave dishes after the system was decommissioned in the 90s.
hi great vid!!! I started building towers in mid 90s. These were also microwave backbone sites that all telephone companies used up to a point....I do know taking them down was interesting....some of the antennae we did alone weighed almost 7 thousand pounds ....the structural steel side of it was insanely engineered and crazy heavy....a lot of them were stripped to allow for newer technologies or just to shed weight for wind loading...anyways cheers!!
If you can find a group of retired telephone company central office technicians they might know someone who worked on that technology. That was from the days when a 56K data circuit was state of the art.
The Long Lines system is from the 1950s. Data speeds then would have been at best 110 bits (0.11K) up thru the 300, 1200, 9600 bauds era to the 33.6K era in the early '90s. By the time 56K came around in the late '90s, the Long Lines system was already gone I believe.
@@guyintenn There was T1 digital carrier in the 1960s. 1.5 megabits consisting of 24 64 KB channels.This was what linked most circuits between central offices . DS3 45 MB was in Central Offices by the 70s
I was an outside Service/Systems Tech for then Pacific Bell Telephone Co. 1974 thru 2004. Back in the 70s, I had the occasion to go down into the AT&T bunker in Corona, Ca. to service a POTS line from the outside world. Topside was just the antenna array, a small fenced off parking lot and what looked like a small shed with a door. Looks were deceiving, however.
Once inside the shed, a small stairway led down to an open 2 foot thick Atomic bomb proof swinging door. Looked like something out of a James Bond movie. I assume this door would close if an atomic attack happened. It would keep the equipment and the people manning the site safe inside and the outside world out.
Inside the underground complex was central office type of equipment, RF equipment and other equipment genre with the intended purpose of telecom xmt and rcv during an attack. My job was only to facilitate a normal POTS (plain old telephone service) from the outside world for everyday communication.
It was a neat experience that few would get to see or do. Glad to have been at the right place at the right time.
rocket
Back in the 70s, I also worked with the old long haul microwave systems. Back when I started, in 1972, 2400B analog was the best available in most areas.
@@rocket4602can you tell us more about the att corona bunker? Are they still using it? Any links to photos of it?
Back in the 80s, my dad worked in the Netcong bunker in NJ. It handled.... well, a lot. A couple of times, we got to go into the bunker with him to look around. I've got faint memories from the visits. At that time, the site was accessed by something that was more of a double track trail through the woods than a road. The trail sat tucked in a quiet little suburban neighborhood with a lot of trees. You drove up and over a hill into a clearing in the forest where the lot and surface buildings were. One building had a stairwell that took you to a hallway with doors at each end. The hallway had decontamination facilities as you walked down it. I remember then doing two 90 degree turns to go down another long hallway where a guard sat behind glass. I'm pretty sure that glass was bullet-proof and he had a hole that he could shoot down the hallway from. Once through, there was a massive blast door that held all of the equipment. That's as much as I remember.
I think it housed the hardware for the NOC in Basking Ridge too. They remodeled the NOC and our family got invited to a family night after the work finished. It had around 3 rows of 25 screens if I remember right. To show off, they put Top Gun on each screen. So I was able to go to school the next day and say I upped my number of viewings of Top Gun by 75 in one night. Fun times.
On a side note, my grandfather worked for Bell Labs/AT&T. Put in the system out at SAC when my mom was a young girl. She and her sisters tell the story about the red phone that they had in the closet that they would charge the neighborhood children to see because that was a pretty big deal then. When we all lived in NJ, he worked in a research facility that had a quiet room. That was cool to experience.
I grew up in Randolph (class of 78), my x Father n Law was a big wig at ATT LL in Bedminster...it wasn't till i got older that i knew what Picatinny Arsenal did too - and had a neighbor that worked there too. Never knew there was one in Netcong - my dad worked in a carpet plant there for a few months, then started WFH when the sold the plant.
@@john5321 It always takes me a little searching to find it again on Google Maps but if you look for Veterans Park, it is now owned/run by Vital Records. Oddly, there's no street view data for Patricia Dr past the intersection but for some reason I feel like that's a newer road. I can't help but feel like the trail I remember is off of Mildred or Jefferson. It just took off into the trees between houses and up and over a hill. On the satellite view, it looks like there might have been another road that went in there.
My dad worked in Long Lines for much of his career in AT&T / The Bell System. Nice video!
When I was a young officer cadet in the Canadian navy in 1981 we would use autovon to call home as it was free v. long distance. You could call any base and then ask the operator for an outside line.
In many mountainous parts of Colorado, people use microwave for all telephony and internet. I sat next to a guy on the plane who maintains them. He was like 70 years old and still consulting. Apparently the expertise is in short supply
That was very cool! I’ve seen some towers like that, and never knew what they were
I grew up about a mile from one of these stations. It was also EchoFox, Combat Ciders and the western terminus of the L5 network. In elementary school, the father of a good friend worked there. He took our class on a field trip. My 10 year old self did not realize how much information passed through that building. Great video.
There's a bit more on the defense side. Back in the late 50s, through the 70s, there was the SAGE network, used to track incoming bombers. This included several radar stations around Canada & U.S., connected to IBM computers. In my work for a Canadian telecom, back in the 70s, the area I covered included several radar stations in Ontario, which were part of the Pine Tree line. Later on, the mid Canada line and DEW line were built further north. The company I worked for carried the SAGE network into some locations, though Bell Canada had most of the circuits.
BTW, you mentioned massive structures. The company I worked for had some microwave systems up on the CN Tower in Toronto and my work occasionally took me up there. For many years, it was the tallest free standing structure in the world.
That's super interesting, would you be open to sharing a little more? I would love to do a follow-up video. Click: petemeets.com/contact
Found a few of these in New Mexico while out exploring some of the public national forest land/random county roads. There was one in particular on top a large hill, only accessible by 4x4 with high ground clearance. It was tucked in and hidden but with antennas visible from the road.
The building itself was very bunkered and had cameras ALL over it
I worked for AT&T as a programmer back in the late 80's. Our manager got us a tour of the underground site at Dranesville, Virginia. It was pretty amazing what they had under there. No pictures though!
Amazing that this video stumbled across my feed. There’s one of these horns out by a hiking trail I love and my mother asked me what it was one day. I assumed it was a microwave horn antenna just by looking at it from miles away. Told her as much, told her it is probably for some old point to point military comms or something.
Then this video pops and and I go check on a long lines map, lo and behold, it’s on the map. Had no idea I was so close, haha. Didn’t even know this network existed until now!
These microwave stations also used TWT (Traveling Wave Tube ) vacuum tube amplifiers between receiving and re-transmitting antennas. They just happened to be quite EMP resistant.
TWT amplifiers are still used in satellites, especially DTH television (Ku band)
The TWT's were used in the TH radio transmitters, but not in the TD-2 terminating equipment.
'CONUS AUTOVON #1 ESS programmer starting '67. Retired from SBC (AT&T) in 2K rather than transfer to Sweltering San Antonio to assume a nationwide emergency HF radio network layer position. Tom TGP
I can appreciate a hobby that isnt very common. I like to look for NGS Benchmarks. Saw this video and was like....that mt is the perfect place for a benchmark...sure enough it has one. Maybe some day I'll go out there to take a pic (assuming its not off limits). thanks for sharing this.
I think the former AT&T location in
White Plains, NY, back from 1960
had these horn antennas and was
supposed to be bombproof. A friend
of mine worked there and in 1987,
he had a letting with permission to
show me around with another friend,
we were all amateur radio operators.
I saw the big relay banks there.
I used Autovon in the US Air Force
and later in Civil Service.
My old bands practice room was in one of the old switch rooms for the long lines in down town Tucson. Never knew it until recently after seeing another video on the subject. I just thought it was the old local phone company. Was always curious why the building was solid concrete. But it was perfect no cell phone service since it was essentially a faraday cage and play as late and as loud as you wanted without bothering anyone.
No way! Is it still there with the equipment inside? I want to tour one.
@@PeteMeets I’m sure the other half of the building has some potential old gear AT&T still owns and operates that side of the building. The side Francisco studios is located is fairly gutted and most of the switch and equipment rooms were all repurposed to be rehearsal rooms for bands across the upper and lower level
@David Rich I always wondered what that building was being a fellow Tucsonan. Thanks for filling in the gaps.
Full nerd time: FYI the low bitrate communications used the LPC codec (I believe the prime example example is the STU I/II/III) which were designed to be intelligible on a low bitrate line with a high bit error rate (up to 5%). The phone you showed was a digital non-secure voice terminal (ta-954) which was a relatively inefficient codec caller CVSD that was easy to implement at low cost, though used 16-32 kbps as opposed to the 2.4 kbps of LPC. My dad worked on LPC so I figured I should give a shout out :)
The DNVTs are pretty cool but were used primarily for tactical communication.
I love it!
I used to patrol 365 miles of Fiber Optic lines in the 80's. I actually went inside one of the microwave towers in Windermere, FL. They are useless in heavy rain as it bends the signal to the ground. That is why they had to have so many so close together, and curvature of the earth. There are huge blast doors inside about 20 feet underground. We still have one in downtown Columbia, SC but is decommissioned. The waveguide horns are around 4500 lbs each. Fiber Optics replaced all of those and multiplied the capacity of the system by thousands. If a fiber optic line is cut it costs AT$T thousands of dollars a minute when they are down. In the 80's most of the cables were 13 pair and cost over $25,000 to repair. We patrolled to intervene in case someone got too close digging. Most patrolling is done by airplanes these days.
>curvature of the earth
Lol good one, now tell us about the moon landing.
@@andrewthomson Send me a video of the edge of earth... I'll send you a video of a ship disappearing over the horizon, observable at any port. Having traveled by ship to 6 countries, I haven't nor do I know of anyone that has seen or even taken a picture of the edge yet. Where is it? Take us there... BTW, your mom called, the dog ate your homework again.
@@helicopterdriver do your own research lol
No, they don't bend signal to the ground.
What happens is, rainfall absorbs microwave radiation at certain frequency ranges, attenuating the signal.
Well known phenomenon.
Years ago I used to service the repeaters for BellSouth (one of the baby bells, was AT&T before and after) and NORAD apparently monitored those towers. Whenever I entered the building it would immediately trip an alarm, I had to make a mad dash and try to find the secure dialess phone or intercom panel within 30 seconds or so, where ever it was (they never seemed to put it anywhere close to the entry door) and pick it up and announce to them who I was and give them the code that was unique to that location, before they had time to summon the police or sheriff out there. To make it extra challenging, sometimes I was unable to get the lights to turn on in the building and there are no windows to let in light, and I forgot to bring a flashlight, and you absolutely didn't leave the door open more than a few seconds. One of the sites locked me in and I couldn't get out right away as I was bringing in test equipment to work and one of the bell guys had to come let me out. I never knew what to expect going into those sites. Also, aside from the tower sites, there were many underground bunker sites for underground cable systems, and occasionally you can find them along the path in city tunnel systems, like subways, coal and utility tunnels but most of them have either have been abandoned or repurposed.
My dad worked at a reagonal toll center in microwave. The remote alarms from the unmanned repeater stations would appear on a C-1 bay. I was with him once when an open door alarm came in, and he got on the order wire, to find out who was there. When the com tech left the repeater, my dad had to yell over the order wire that all was clear, so that he could hear him through the door! Oh, how I love and miss the old days!
I grew up next to one near Moro, Oregon. It was eventually taken down. Had thick concrete walls, massive batteries, and a huge diesel generator. Always was a creepy looking place when I was young.
I got to work on one of these sites surrounding Washington DC meant for the continuity of government. It was significantly more hardened than this facility but that's all I can say about it. There were a lot of other sites on steel towers including some that were used for SIGINT that everyone knew about but were supposed to be secret. Hidden in plain sight...
Great story. Are you interested in being a tour guide for some of those sites? I’d love to do a followup video. Please email me - see my about page for address.
I have been to several of these sites around where I grew up in Nevada, and one of the largest was on top of Loveland Pass in Colorado Rockies, some of the best way to locate some of the sites is to follow power lines that head into the mountains.
I've met a couple of techs back in the early 1990's that described going into these types of locations and the high security in some. Many (probably most) were just commercial long distance communications. I remember one building right next to an interstate that was mostly underground and no antennas but there was obviously military com involved just by seeing the outside physical security. One tech said he had an armed guard next to him at all times, inspected his toolkit and restricted his movement inside the facility. He wasn't allowed to ask questions, just do his job and get out.
I think over the years most of these are out of commission being replaced when MCI, Sprint, etc. (Bell dereg) started building their own networks along railroads bypassing ATT.
Thank you! I live in Rome Georgia and never knew what that "weird" building downtown next to the Hardee's, that is so pristine and immaculately clean, actually was. Good information. Not exactly sure why, lol, but this was a very satisfying video. Great job.
I spent 45 years in the radio and microwave business in Southern California. I've been to Turquoise dozens of times over the years, including inside the old AT&T building. Not only was it part of the Autovon network, it was also a critical site for the major television networks. There were three floors in that building. One floor was batteries and power equipment, one was switching equipment, and the top floor was row after row of radios. TD-2 4 GHz, AR-6 6 GHz radios, DR-11 11 GHz radios... Just tons of the stuff. There was also a huge nationwide network map on the wall that showed how the network television was brought in from NY, Wash DC, LA, and various other major cities.
Thia was a fun well done video, I quite enjoyed it.
I was an air traffic controller at a regional facility known as an ARTCC. Early in my career we had the remnants of old cold war tech. Our phone system was old hard wired copper, and we had several lines labeled LL. I'd heard the term Longline, but never knew what it was until now!
If you like this cold war tech stuff, you should investigate the ARTCCs. There are 20 of them around the country, all still in their original 1963 buildings (with a lot of mods). They were all located in semi remote areas to avoid nuclear damage. We had a hardened basement with cots and C-RATS in case things got hot. Also had an HF radio on site!
Lotsa cool history and stories for another vid ;-)
There’s one of these on saddle peak above Malibu, concrete tower with steel platforms, big concrete bunker. Never really thought about it being a hardened structure from the cold war.
I have been intrigued by Long Liines sites for quite a few years and I always look for them in my travels, especially here in the Southwest. Sadly, a lot of them are being dismantled. There was a tower 10 miles south of my house that was totally dismantled shortly after I moved in about 10 years ago. It was on US Forest Service land and I suppose that the Government wanted it gone for some reason, and I never got to explore it.
As a kid back in the day, I imagined the horn antenna as seats for the gods. Started working with microwave radio in 79, and really appreciated them
The majority of the communications links were carried by buried cables called L4. Microwave links were used to route links off the main buried cables and to route around sections of the cable that were knocked out. Every 150 miles or so there was a Main Station that monitored its section of cable and took care of maintenance activites. Many of these were underground bunkers designed to survice a near hit of a 20 MT ground burst at 2 miles. Specific Main Stations contained large AUTOVON switching systems for the military and also contained facilities for phone to radio patching of presidential aircraft communications and airborne military command aircraft such as LOOKING GLASS and its airborne back ups.
The British version was called Backbone, and mobile military communications systems that emerged from bunkers after nuclear strikes was called Conrad .
One of the original 7 sites is near my house in northern CT. Back in the 90's my buddy and I used to go up there and talk on our ham radios since it was one of the highest points around. I tried going there last year but it was sold off to a private party and the access road is closed now. At the time we had no idea what the site was for.
The facility where I worked, (Early '70's), had a decontamination station at an entrance. We also had tower material stored so we could erect a replacement tower in the event the above-ground equipment was lost in a nuclear blast. I transitioned to the fiber optic world when we phased out the Terrestrial Microwave system.
Only 30 subscribers? We had similar microwave telecommunication antennas in Czechoslovakia. I rent my electronics lab in the telephone exchange building from where the antennas were fed. The large grey parabola antennas were mounted on the nearby high-rise building.
Yeah, it’s a new channel. ;) I hope you have windows, a lot of the US telco buildings are like fortresses.
I’m pretty sure there is one sitting on MD Rt. 140 in Finksburg, MD. Still intact, painted red and white. It’s been there as far back as the ‘70’s that I remember. Probably much longer.
Those microwave relay segments had a bit of delay and they have very complex echo cancellation equipment.
@BartlettTFD • 2 minutes ago
These sites were owned and operated by AT&T Long Lines. They provided the country's microwave backbone prior to the advent of fiber. The
layout was as follows: 12 voice channels = 1 "Group". 5 of these Groups comprised a "Supergroup" which was 60 voice channels. 10
Supergroups = 1 "Mastergroup" which was of course 600 voice channels. These "Mastergroups" were wired to a "FMT" ( frequency modulated
transmitter) which modulated 1 channel of the microwave transmitter.
At the receive end, it was exactly the same except it had an FMR, FM Receiver.
As I recall, their were 10 microwave channels, A, B, C ,D,E, F,G,H, + X, and Y. X & Y were the protect channels and would not be used unless one of the channels failed.
When I was involved, I worked in tv network transmission. 4 of the lettered channels were assigned to NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS. (FOX didn't exist back then.) I would use "X" & "Y" for NFL games which was risky since it left no "protection" channels available in case of equipment failure.
Weekends were really crazy back then, with multiple switches occurring to make sure the right tv station got the right NFL game!
An exciting job!
My dad was involved in that too! The TV networks would buy airtime using those protection channels. They would manually put up the patch, and then take it down when the program was over. They'd say we have a "goodnight".
I had no problem understanding supergroups and mastergroups (L-1, L-3 carrier), it was the jumbo groups that got me!
And those channels caused Terrestrial Interference for satellite receive locations. It took special filters to null the Bell carriers that were centered near the satellite carriers. Took a spectrum analyzer and time to clear up some of the interference. Some.
This brings back memories! My dad worked for PT&T, later AT&T, in the San Bernardino toll regional center. Back in the 70's we traveled all over the Mojave desert and went to many of the microwave sites. He and I visited Turquoise one day, and got to go inside. The building was full of TD-2 and TH radio terminating equipment, FMT's & R's, switching bays, and power equipment. I can still remember the blue walls and darker blue doors. There was a crew of Western Electric guys working there that day. Later we met all those same guys in the nearby town of Baker at the only diner in town for dinner! That was another era. All these sites are dead now. Replaced with fiber optic cables. It makes me sad !
You might want to check out another microwave station called Kelso. It's just south of Turquoise on the Kel-Baker road. I was up there once, and watched the sun come up. It looked beautiful shining on those horn reflector antennas!
I have access too and even had to spend the night in one of these towers. They were even built for a nuclear blast with winding hallways to dissipate blast over pressure, etc. There is even a high point of the tower we call the crow's nest. Sitting on it feels like the entire tower is going to fall over due to the wind moving the crows nest back and forth.
Do you have access to one with the original equipment? I’d love to learn more.
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I own an auto repair shop right next to an old At&T switching building. I’ve been here for like 15 years and the building houses one of these huge long line antennas, I always sort of ignored it like the backdrop of telephone lines. Just recently, I was given a tour inside the building and also got to see the underground bunker. What blew me away was the size of the switching building. It was designed to handle over 100 people at a time; huge cafeteria, huge bathrooms. Now, there is one guy operating the building. He showed me all the different floors, first floor dedicated to generators and a huge bank of back up batteries, two entire floors dedicated to switching phone lines and then the top floor, which was extremely empty, one corner of it being dedicated to the entire areas fiber optic communications.
The tour of the bunker was really cool too, it was a bunker essentially built into the side of the mountain we are on. It felt very coldwar’ish. Glad I saw this video now explaining its purpose!
I live near a bunch of these and my old employer owned a couple so I've been in them. Really really big and sure felt like they could do survival almost anytime. The building has such tall ceilings and abandoned equipment from floor to ceiling in spots. The ones near me probably wasn't staffed 24/7 and I am not sure about a bunker. This site is amazing history the way it hasn't been taken apart to be reused
My wife and I both were recruited Pacific Bell out of the Military to work in the LA area. She worked in the Madison Complex, the downtown building you showed a picture of. After eight years I transferred to Nevada as a Microwave technician and wound up going into several of the long line buildings along with many other microwave buildings in Nevada which were built to transport phone calls across Nevada to the Rural towns, some sites were on the top of mountains over 10,000 feet tall. Each month we had to do FCC required frequency and power checks and document our findings in our log books.
I have a vacuum tube that was used for this microwave technology. It had to be specially designed and constructed to work at these microwave frequencies. It is heavily gold plated and screws into a waveguide. High tech back in the late 1950s.....
I've seen those. They're special triode tubes that required a special tool to screw them in and out of the waveguide cavity. They were used in the transmitting terminal of the TD-2 radio bay.
When I was a tower technician I got to climb very near to a few of these. They’re really something you have to see in person.
I remember noticing them and being fascinated by them when I was a kid. Between 68 and 78 I lived out around Trenton New Jersey and used to spot these towers, painted red and white. My dad kind of explained what they were but it all went over my head back then.
Last time I went out that way I still saw some of them around and I think I might go back with my drone to get some shots. I might even make a video of various kinds of towers...
Now I live near AT&t in Holmdel/ Middletown New Jersey. They have something called The big bang horn antenna on display out behind one of the buildings. Maybe I should include that...
I used to live in Hamilton NJ and we had the relay tower near our house. Didn't think much of it then, but now I got to admit this is fascinating. The building was like walking into a concrete bunker. My Dad worked for Western Electric in Hopewell NJ, so we always went to the open houses in the 70's and early 80's
@@brianporter4352
You and I were probably looking at the same tower. Back then I was visiting dad on weekends. He lived on shady Lane near route 33. you would drive out 195 West and get off at whatever exit and then drive-through Hamilton to get to his place. Our weekend activities took us all around the area from bordentown to Princeton but I don't imagine there were many towers in the area.
Trenton speedway was still there back then and I took my hunting test at colliers Mills. Grandparents lived in robbinsville not far from East Windsor speedway and "Uncle George", my father's friend was over in Roosevelt I believe. For only being around on the weekends I have a lot of memories out there.
I just might go out to Pop pop's grave tomorrow on Memorial day. I'll keep my eye open for the tower 🙂
@@jerseyshoredroneservices225 Yes we were looking at the same tower. There are no towers in Princeton, and not very good cell service either- especially in the hills of Princeton. Don't remember much of Trenton Speedway, but do remember the Fairgrounds, and we used to attend Shrine Circus' there too. I absolutely remember the East Windsor Speedway-that was fun. Roosevelt is an interesting town, unfortunately a lot of the original houses have been remodeled and they lost some of their 1930 charm. I believe the tower is still there, it is probably used for cell service now, but it is fascinating to see them and know that every long distance call in the US was transmitted and received by these relay towers at one time
As someone whos obsessed with towers, it could be any tower, radio, tv, cell, communication. Im glad there are others and makes me happy
I was thinking of doing a video on all the towers you see in everyday life but maybe it wouldn’t be as interesting because there are only a few different kind of antennas?
You didn't mention but that network was also developed at the same time in Canada by Bell Lab to transmit both phone voice calls and CBC - Radio-Canada broadcasting from coast to coast.
Mike mapped almost all of the Canadian sites!
I used to deliver propane to a lot of those destinations across Northern Nevada and Eastern California. Topaz is my favorite
There is one of these long line towers here in San Jose, Ca. on Communication Hill. Always see it off the freeway & was fascinated by the way it looks. Great video !!
This building is now owned by Verizon Wireless. Its nearly completely gutted on the inside with the exception of the cell site VZW operates. All of the cornucopia MW dishes are not used and should be dismantled. As you noted the one has dislodged. I recall the building had several stories in it and super eerie. Like freaky eerie. There were old “safety first” signage from the ATT years(side note, ATT moved out of the building and their cell site is one of the ones nearby)…lots of office space. Loose papers strewn about. Dark with no windows. Nobody can hear you from outside. Certainly wouldn’t want to be in there alone. Abandoned electrical switch gear, which by the way some were still energized and not safetied off. It seemed bomb resistant, but we’ve all seen bunker busters on youtube that would easily penetrate this building. Probably emp resistant to a certain extent. This was certainly one of the cooler sites I visited and worked on.
I remember seeing several of these when I was a kid, and being fascinated. I knew they were microwave transmitters because one was at the AT&T building downtown.