Our interest in the AT&T Longlines Microwave System goes way back. It turns out that when my mother worked for Pacific Telephone in the 1950's, she was responsible for provisioning and outfitting of the microwave stations in California. Womans' work, to be sure, but while the Toll guys were busy installing racks and radios, she decided that they needed desks, chairs, and file cabinets.
During my own time with Pacific Telephone and Mountain Bell, I was always interested in what happened in Toll. In the 1970's, a young man could not expect to get a craft position, so I started out as an Operator. Depending upon the Office, Operators were divided between Toll and Directory Assistance. There was always a certain magic associated with the Toll side of the business. We had an Inward way to connect to Operators in other Central Offices, as they did with ours. It was a thrill to answer the Inward Trunk and talk to other Operators from around the country and around the world.
The mere fact that I could plug a Minneapolis trunk and talk to people a thousand miles away was an amazing feat. America had the greatest telephone system in the world. As a young man familiar with electronics and radio, I had a grasp of the complicated maze of wires, switches, and radio relays required to make up the telephone network. To the general public, that I could dial a number and speak to a specific person across the country was no longer a miracle. After all, we had sent a man to the moon, and the achievement of great things was becoming routine.
It is important to see the AT&T Longlines Microwave System in this context. One of the primary drivers for the System was the Cold War. The Air Force needed a fast and reliable method of communicating with their radar stations, and with the planes that had to be scrambled if Soviet invaders were detected. Western Electric and Bell Labs had already developed the technology and had it widely deployed throughout the country. All that was needed was to expand the system to the radar stations in the hinterlands, to increase the reliability with redundant routes, and to increase the bandwidth to handle real-time video. This they achieved in the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's.
In the early days, the microwave relays were low, squat buildings with short towers. Later, they were all hardened facilities, made with steel-reinforced concrete, and towers were located behind mountain-tops to protect them from nuclear blast effects. As the Cold War wound down, and budgets got tighter, the last sites were built with concrete block. As you look around the country, you will find some aerial routes were replaced with coaxial cable, to make them more secure and better protected.
This current effort began with a photograph from Greg Muir. While building a
commercial FM station, he had seen a microwave routes map on the wall at the East Helena
Relay. He sent me a photo of the map and I started thinking about all the AT&T
Longlines Microwave Sites that I had seen in the course of my career. I started building
a database and gathering information about each one. While traveling around the region,
I took note of the sites and plotted them on my mapping program.
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master.
For something as large and important as the AT&T Longlines Microwave System, there
is surprisingly little information available on the Internet. American Tower posted
their sites, and some small operators that purchased individual or small clusters of
sites have posted limited bits of information about them, but to my knowledge, no one
has attempted to gather system-wide information.
In order to keep this undertaking to a manageable size, I limited my scope to the three states immediately around our home base. In early 2010, we traveled to Nebraska and added that state to our database. Those of you who have read thus far are invited to help me by supplying any data you have about AT&T Longlines Microwave Sites.
Spreadsheet file of all four states.
Montanavision Home Page.
This page updated 11-July-2010.