[BC] unreliable old equipment query

[Bill Brister]

I always felt the reason that inter-city never worked right was he tried to
design it with too few tower links. He stretched it to far trying to save
money. Only two relays in 90 miles. The Morton tower was several hundred
feet high. The Newton tower was much shorter causing a lot of Fresnel
problems. That link was doomed from the design conception.

The tariff on the original AT&T link from Jackson was $16,000 per month.
That was in 1968. He obviously couldn't handle that for very long so he
threw his money away on a flawed inter-city. His intentions were good he
just didn't know how to fix it.

Bill

-----Original Message-----

 From: H.A. Stanton

Well,
 That certainly brings back the memories.
 First the funnies: WHTV began with temporary service from AT-T just across
the road using a portable RCA 6Ghz microwave link, but toll costs from
Jackson, nearest tariff point some 90 miles distant. Very expensive.
 Built our own inter-city microwave with then new MA-COM MA-2A gear. First
Monday morning on the new link, following shutdown of the AT-T link on the
Sunday nite, we suffered a 2+ hour fade! That never worked out well either!
We signed on and filed bankruptcy the same day. My lifelong joke was with
every UHF CP there should have blank bankruptcy papers sent along in the
envelope.
 So that if you didn't have the money for the postage later, it would
already be on hand.  Many times the AT-T / GTE coax and Microwave links
would fade, but the audio was delivered via twisted pairs mostly, so loss of
video was not necessarily paired with loss of audio. People would listen,
then catch back up with the return of the pictures. More in the next one.
   Harold