[BC] Lines

[Clive Warner]

>Our audio was delivered by 5 kHz equalized loop thanks to SW Bell.
>I believe that was the norm in many parts of the country

Everything used to be lines. In the UK we had 6KHz lines. Lots of EQ to keep
the response flat. We would 'squeak' them every few weeks with an automatic
tone tester that gave us a printed graph of the response.
One day I lost 3 lines and was waiting for them to be repaired. At nearly 5
pm I jacked in an engineer's headset and heard two Post Office engineers
talking on one of them. It went like:
"Joe, any luck with 603-14 yet?"
"No. Full of water at the box here."
"How about 606-2?"
"Haven't got to that one yet. Anyway, it's about time to go home, we can
start again tomorrow sometime."
(I hit the talk button at this point) "Hey! No you don't! This is the
transmitting station and we've got two overseas feeds still off air!"
I managed to shame them into finishing.
We also had a device that combined two ordinary phone lines using one as
'high band' and the other as 'low band' to give us over 6KHz bandwidth. It
was fine provided the phase relationship was correct. If you had one side
inverted it sounded like a scrambler.
Clive