Long Lines 

Something most definitely broke, just didn't let out the magic smoke 😅

A great video on RU-vid is a Bell System 1968 film called "Without Fail.". Corn some reason it comes up as "The amazing unfailing Bell System. I watch it periodically to remind myself how great a system it was.

@@mepperganfortas The current AT&T is not the AT&T of old. After the breakup there was a lot of chaos that took place in both the Bell System and the telephone industry in general. To make a very long story short, as I mentioned in a previous comment, the former AT&T aka the Bell System aka Ma Bell was weakened to the point that it was taken over by one of her former "children" Southwest Bell Telephone. That entity took on the name of its former parent and became the AT&T we have today. The former AT&T was a MUCH BETTER organization than the AT&T that exists now.

Dad worked on Motorola two ways from the earliest I could remember then sold for Motorola for over 30 years. He too would explain the various towers we saw as I traveled with him: TD towers, Range stations, broadcast stations, comms stations, the works.

They also have a ton of engineers our age there who work alongside with all Bell System engineers. All the equipment can be played with and you can ask all the questions you want. It’s awesome. Plan your next trip there

@@cameronweston1762that sounds awesome, did they have broadcast Tx equipment too?

​@@TheMW2informerthey do. I worked on trying to get some carrier systems working there a couple of years ago myself :)

they also have a RU-vid channel, they post a lot of great videos

So much for stopping monopoly capitalism. Our government is bought and paid for by these companies.

BACK IN MY DAY lol, cell sites would only need 4 t-1s. They soon doubled every couple years when cdma came and improved. The latest and greatest is the fiber for c-band. 125 gig WDM muxers in each site.

Is that a Nokia? We just started installing SAR’s to replace sonet equipment, but we use Aviat radios for microwave. The shelves are very similar in size and design.

@@SovietRobot69 Yeah, Nokia MPR9500, same as the Alcatel units.

T1 breakout = channel bank?

They operated smack in the 4ghz satellite downlink C band. That is why up until the mid 1980s C band satellite receive stations also had to be licensed as the receiver LO could cause interference to the AT&T links. With the AT&T breakup and the proliferation of back yard C band receivers before scrambling, the FCC finally gave up on the C band receive license requirement.

@@andydelle4509 Thanks for the system frequency history, very interesting!

The nuclear continuity plan is to destroy all other countries entirely to save what they can of the US. We're all dead once there's no food, no low-cost Chinese manufactering which is essential now, no ships crossing the ocean. Remember COVID and supply chain problems? You ain't seen nothing. All outbound missiles are pretargetted there are no options for surviving nuclear war other than to hope we hit them before they hit us. They have us convinced that they're going to protect us. With what? I don't want to survive such an eventl Nuclear winter, no energy, no water, no food. Good times.

There’s a guy on Facebook that maintains data on active sites. There’s still one or two active sites using the original microwave horns.

@@thecooldude9999 You don't have the link for that do you?

@@idahofur You tube tends to block links / even the hint of a link so be aware if you don't get a reply.

@@bobroberts2371 That’s what happened :(

Glad you enjoyed it!

I kind of figured that was the case. I was a contractor for our local telco (which was bought out by Bell Canada in 2016, kind of a full circle story since our government had bought it from Bell in 1908) and have been in many CO's and seen a LOT of old switching equipment. No mechanical switches, but mostly Nortel DMS and a few Automatic Electric GTD-5 in very rural offices. This stuff looked newer than the stuff I saw!

Exactly. AT&T Long Lines. And every AT&T long lines site, from underground cable to microwave stations and repeaters carried the Autovon network. The traffic from the Autovon network commingled with normal traffic

Same here. All the telco central offices were 48 volt. I was not aware the relay sites were 24 volt. Most of those panels he referred to as processors were most likely multiplex units. This was not what we think of today as packet data. Voice channels were 64kb each and 24 of them became a T1 (1.544M) and then those were combined to a higher data rate and then modulated onto an RF carrier that was then upconverted to the actual Microwave Frequency. Unlike our in-home Wifi that is half duplex, these were full duplex units they had a TX channel and and RX channel for each. That must have been a newer SW Bell site. The older AT&T sites had really thick solid concrete walls that were like 18 inches thick. The one I was in a few years back even had a generator room. The generator was huge and was inside the building. Still a nice video 🙂

Ah, I see you talked about them being digital. That’s what I get for commenting before watching the whole video :)

In particular anything with the AT&T “death star”logo on it is from 1983 or later.

I believe that is FR8, AT&T’s last generation of analog microwave ( with the Death Star logo) though it could carry T1s from terminal to terminal. I worked on some in the 90s and even occasionally post Y2K, after I graduated college. It was cool to learn. The mux equipment was from Grainger, and when I was troubleshooting an issue, I ran across the statement that a circuit carrying a high speed modem required a pilot sync card to be installed in the shelf. Elsewhere high speed modem was defined as anything faster than 300 baud.

I can’t edit- analog means the radios take an analog input, called based band and mux it up to 70 MHz IF, than microwave. Digital systems digitally modulate the carrier using discrete I and Q signals. Analog microwave can carry digital signals using a modem, digital microwave can carry analog signals using a channel bank. We’ve run digital and analog on the same link at the same time ( but different frequencies). We may have been the first guys to disconnect the B channel of a FR-8 and replace it with digital microwave, while A still carried traffic with out interruption.

No transmitters were harmed in the making of this video. They were not powered on.

Unpopular Opinion Ahead - As a broadcast engineer, I would have kept my hands off the equipment. Take the pictures I needed, and LEAVE without touching ANYTHING... Without knowing anything about the site... Nobody has any idea of the condition of the electrical, grounding, spurious emissions, and other functions of the site without a proper inspection and approval to turn the equipment on. That aside, I do give credit where credit is due. Great video and good simple description of everything that's in the site. Great piece of history and excellent show of PPE and safety knowledge. A sleeping beauty finally awakened...

People can be cremated - not inanimate objects.

@@MendotaTech I get what you are saying about powering that stuff up cold after 20+ years. I 'm also a close to retirement broadcast engineer and even collect old analog and early SDI gear. But sadly all that stuff we see here is headed for a land fill anyway.

Hahaha! As a Television Broadcast Engineer Specializing in ENG and dSNG 2,6,7,12 & 14 GHz and still a Satellite Uplink Truck OP; I gotta admit. I Scrutinized! 😜 I was looking at that Waveguide (likely close to 6GHz by it's size; It wasn't KU or X-Band waveguide. and I call it HARDguide) And when he was describing the Ice Bridge, There was no Flex Guide (or Transmission line) Heading out of the building! I took a close look at the panel and noticed most of the panel had light duty terminators placed on the ends, One or two were left open and I had to go back to when he turned the black knobs on the modulators. From the brief glimpse of the HPAs he gave us, the one or two HPAs that he did show WERE IN STANDBY!! Otherwise those little terminators would have turned into brake lights with forward drive on! There were NO Dummy Loads on that outside panel! I will say this: Long lines were replaced by Communications Satellites (that were even longer lines haha), performed the same job, but also allowed Simultaneous reception anywhere in the continental US. That's what killed long lines. Broadcasters like NBC, CBS, PBS and ABC could now send programming directly to specific Affiliates and disseminate primetime programming across the nation in just under 2 seconds. Now days, Fiber (including IP based) and Cellular Bonded modems are killing Satellite communications (and my career). And now, my head is filled with too much useless information regarding old and retired communications systems like this.

i second this. it would be very cool of that museum to preserve all of this!

Me Three!

Unlike Cell Phones, Hardline phones (Ma Bell/At&T) were federally mandated to a specific functional "Up Time" of: 99.997%.

@@miketomas8564 oh that why well keep up the good work out there and have an excellent day

My wife says she has a piece of memorabilia from that era. DE KL7DL

You could probably find this old gear at Goodwill.. hahaha... (😳 Not Joking!)

Wait! Does this mean the earth isn't flat?

I can tell you that the Analog Video portion would have been36MHz each. That would have dropped down to a minimum of 6MHz when digital video modems came into play.

'Modern comm facilities are so boring" Right? Modern comm facilities are so Point-n-Click...

6 Gig as well. late 40s they had some experimental routes going, 1951 they had a transcon microwave path NY to SF. A good bit of it was shut down in 92, replaced by fiber optics.

@@davewood406 I remember in 99,00the new fiber was being trenched along the highways. I worked at a government facility and our data went slowly. I remember the morning the first fiber went online and the speed was so fast. The copper was maxed out all the time and it went from 100% capacity to.0001 capacity in a matter of seconds. It really changed the world

@@ocsrc If you're not familiar with DWDM and CWDM fiber tech, dig in. Just an upgrade at the equipment at the ends, as long as the existing fibers are in good shape, they can carry a lot more data.

@@davewood406 pre-99 in our area we had fiber run by the cable company between the major cities on poles, but when AT&T ran the new fiber, I was driving a lot back and forth 300 miles each way, and they trenched and buried 8 plastic conduits along the utility ROW where the old copper was, and they installed the flower pots. That was handled by a third party, then they ran the fiber and they only ran just one of the conduit and they built a new switching center underground where the two interstates interchange was. They connected into the COs in the major metro areas, 6 cities in my state. Seeing the giant metal jacket L4 cables and the tiny fiber and the fact that it could carry hundreds of thousands the amount of data, it makes me wonder what we will have 50 years from now. I remember when C-band first started and cell phones when only the phone company had them on the 30 MHz low band, and then 800 MHz commercial cell phones, and Ku band when it first came out and was experimental. And now C-band is about to be retired from satellite service and transferred to cell phone use. I have seen the laser communication used for satellites and I have seen it used from the ground station, even tracking the moving satellites. The beam was only visible when you wore the special glasses to see laser light. I just wonder if that will replace the fiber one day. At least from metro area to metro area. I still remember dial up at 300 baud And the first fax machines And the first gateways to dial in to the Internet. Young people who have never known a Time without smartphones don't understand what it was like before the revolution. It was peaceful and quiet but there was a lot of down time. I sit at restaurants or in doctor offices and I think about what it was like waiting 20 or 30 minutes, just sitting doing nothing and how boring it was. I really hope I live to see the brain implant to communicate with our digital devices. Just think turn off the master bedroom lights and Alexa will read our thoughts and turn them off. And self driving cars, that we can just go to sleep and wake up 10 hours later and be at our destination. It will change the world, again.

L Carrier? Like L-BAND? 70MHz Modulation?

I'm not sure, but I've seen identical batteries in a telephone exchange.

They were lead-acid.

For the most part the microwave and other transmission equipment is powered by lead acid cells. I’ve seen nickel-iron and other alkaline cells used as start batteries for the on-site diesel generators or turbines if the site has them, although sometimes they are the more standard automotive lead acid type.

Strap in... Pre divestiture it was all one but there were business groups with separate responsibilities, so up until 1984 it was the Long Lines Division of AT&T. Though for some reason the Pacific Bell region, Long Lines was handled by Pacific Bell. Which as the RBOCs reorganized, merged and whatnot after Divestiture became Southwestern Bell(SBC then AT&T as it exists today) So that might be what tripped him up. I want to say Long Lines stayed part of what was left of Ma Bell at least for a while but you need a map for the Splits and mergers post Divestiture... I'd hope someone could paint a clearer picture but they way it played out was a mess and easy to get things confused.

Well that makes sense, it's wild just how much history the bell system has. I love it all, and seeing this site powered up was insane.

I do believe they're a nickel-iron battery look up Edison batteries you can go down the rabbit hole of when exide battery purchased them and switch them all out to lead acid did the Edison battery last and definitely just drain out the electrolyte every 50 years

@@kurtzxcvb3481 Wow that is what I thought they look like. Those batteries last literally forever. Very cool.

@@kurtzxcvb3481 I saw a life expectancy chart tucked into a round cell stand when we removed some and I forget exactly but somewhere around 70 degrees they expected 100 years of service. Assuming proper maintenance of course. A warmer room diminished life quite a bit. Still better than the VRLA they use now though.

Absolutely!

Thank You.

I dont know the detailed specs but they are 2V cells wired up in series to achevie 24VDC

@@ATI556 Achieve

From the video, the battery type appears to be lead-acid, based upon cell and charging voltage.

There were some Long Lines sites built like this one after 1983 (post Bell System divestiture). Some still exist today, but instead of using analog or digital microwave radio to access or regenerate the network signal, they typically use fiber optic equipment.

By the size of the WaveGuide that he showed, I'd say it's around 6 GHz. But I didn't work in that side of communications.