AM Amateurs in Telcom Industry

[W9GT]

Jack, found the old thread 'MA BELL' and read that one also. Interesting post there by K4KYV/Don about 'getting caught' by a repairman for having RF chokes on his moms' line to free her of his AM signal on her line. Strange since RF chokes & caps were the 'prescribed repair technique' for RF interference in the Bell System?

I must have missed that one the first time around.  Yes, in fact I was directly involved with RFI mitigation and I personally installed RF chokes and by-pass caps on many lines.  We put them in the protector box as well as at the individual instrument location.  Worked great!  Of course, that was GTE....not a Bell company at the time.  Bell (and GTE) also had an RFI filter that consisted of a toroid RF choke in a plastic housing that was a standard fix for AM broadcast station interference.  We used them, but they weren't very effective for HF interference.  I went on many calls to customers complaining about hams and/or CBers coming in on their telephone.  Was able to solve most of them with RF Chokes and caps.  Also worked on one interesting one that involved our Low Band (30 MHz) AM paging transmitter (yeah...long time ago) getting into a church PA system.  Solved that one with RF chokes and cleaning up their microphone cabling.  Ah...the good old days.

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Even more astounding is the fact that all the "baby Bells" created by divestiture in 1984 are now merging and re-combining and creating a reincarnation of MA BELL.  Hmmmmm.......what is wrong with this picture?  Why did the government force the split to start with, if they were just going to allow them to recombine?  Maybe heavily-regulated "monopolies"  and the "universal service concept" were not all that bad to start with?

73,  Jack, W9GT

There will never be another MA BELL because the "mother" has died. The pre-divestiture  business model died along with her. The merging of these "baby bells" will never equal the monopolistic power the former Bell System had on the industry. In pre-divestiture days, AT&T, WECo. and Bell Laboratories had lots of "power" over control and direction of the telecommunications industry, and in hindsight, to much power.

Power and Control- "There can be only one!"

[Pete, WA2CWA]

If you ever visited the Bell Labs facility in Holmdel, NJ, here are some latest pictures. They will start removal of all the inside facilities soon, and in time, the complete demolition of the entire building. Lots of design and research innovation came out of this building over the years. I worked here for 18 years and had a visiting office after that, for about 10 years more. We had a very active amateur station here for many years. Lots of hams roamed the building during annual lab and room cleanup each year doing dumpster diving.

http://gallery.planethofmann.com/album/366922#imageID=18116171

[W9GT]

Pete,

That looks like a magnificent facility!  It must have been uplifting and inspiring just to work at such a place.  Certainly, tons of great developments and inventions came out of Bell Labs over the years.  It has been known worldwide as the birthplace of a tremendous amount of the technology that was the basis for nearly all of our wireline and wireless networks.

GTE Labs was probably a "junior" version, but I never had the opportunity to visit that facility.  I'm not sure what became of it after the mergers and consolidations. 

Thanks for sharing the pictures!

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Pete, WA2CWA]

At one point, sometime in the 80's, we had roughly 6800 people working there. There was a time, if you view the photos where they have all those chairs grouped together, because of the amount of hiring, that the facilities people had to create a raised floor and temporary office space. To provide "privacy, they erected a fish net type cloth hanging over them. Interesting projectiles, coming from the upper floors, had to be removed each week. I remember some engineers participating in an interesting noon time activity of standing at one end of the building and projecting a rolling stainless steel bearing on the floor to the opposite end of the building. With stop watch in hand, you listened for the clunk at the other end. Knowing distance, time, and mass of the object, all types of calculations could be made. Engineers at play!

Behind all those metal walls are probably several million miles of copper wire. Lots of famous people wandered those halls over the years. Many were hams. Some the best construction articles that appeared in ham publications in the 50's, 60's, and 70's were probably conceived initially at lunch time activities known as "government" jobs or simply "g" jobs.

And how many can say they sat under this antenna to operate Field Day.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Penzias and Wilson used the data captured with the horn to help formulate their "Big Bang" theory. The horn was also used for Telstar. Lots of great radio stuff happened on the hill over the years. One year for Field Day, the facilities people forgot to cut the wild grass, and it was about 3 feet high when we set up. Couldn't dare try to have a smoke while operating and prayed that no sparks would jump out of the transmitters. Haven't been up the hill in years and don't even know if the horn is still there. Seems to me there was also a very large parabolic antenna up there too, but can't find any pictures of it.

[Carl WA1KPD]

Pete, I'm sure there was a valid accounting reason for the 'pay them big to go and pay them more to come back' approach.

Mack; When you consider the entire cost a company has when employing someone, wages, health care plan, SSI, workman's comp., maybe a 401K or other EIP,

You nailed it. Add in vacation, average sick time, coffee break time, uniforms, vehicle, training expense, time off for holidays, family death. Add in retirement and other items the average cost per hour of an employee goes far past the wage.

A contract employee costs significantly less then one on the payroll.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Pete, I'm sure there was a valid accounting reason for the 'pay them big to go and pay them more to come back' approach.

Mack; When you consider the entire cost a company has when employing someone, wages, health care plan, SSI, workman's comp., maybe a 401K or other EIP,

You nailed it. Add in vacation, average sick time, coffee break time, uniforms, vehicle, training expense, time off for holidays, family death. Add in retirement and other items the average cost per hour of an employee goes far past the wage.

A contract employee costs significantly less then one on the payroll.

Yep. We called that a "loaded salary" for a regular employee. When you get a contract "employee", they're generally hired through a Contract House". It's almost like renting a tool with an unlimited warranty; after some time passes buy, tool gets worn out or doesn't meet your new tool requirements, you can return it and get another one. The cost is a deductible expense  to running a business. The Contract House rents tools.
 

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Pete, looks like the horn stays forever, National Historic marker. I found a pic of the dish antenna, probably gone now.

Mack

Ah! Super stuff. We were posting almost at the same time. The position of the horn in the picture is how we positioned it after lashing masts with beams to the side. My bottom picture in the previous post shows us sitting under the opening. On voice transmissions, we had our own natural echo box.

[W9GT]

Those horns are really cool.  They worked on all of the microwave bands with an extensive filter/combiner/feed unit.  Do you guys remember the old lens antennas on the old AT&T towers?  They were very interesting as well.  I remember the old TD2 microwave systems,etc.  Before the advent of satellites, we got our network video feeds from AT&T here in Ft. Wayne.  The old horn antenna is still on the tower.  We took the video from them and transported to the local TV stations via 16PEVL 124 ohm balanced coaxial cable systems with GE balanced amplifiers and equalizers.

73,  Jack, W9GT

[W9GT]

[/quote]

Yep. We called that a "loaded salary" for a regular employee. When you get a contract "employee", they're generally hired through a Contract House". It's almost like renting a tool with an unlimited warranty; after some time passes buy, tool gets worn out or doesn't meet your new tool requirements, you can return it and get another one. The cost is a deductible expense  to running a business. The Contract House rents tools.
 
[/quote]

Seems kinda sad to me, but I understand the business reasoning.  I guess we are all destined to being viewed as old worn-out tools???   Cheaper to rent, than buy???

73, W9GT

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

A contract employee costs significantly less then one on the payroll.

Cost less, maybe, but a better value, often not. Contract employees often don't produce as much as company employees due to lack of buy-in/allegiance to the company, the contract often limits flexible use of the person (e.g. they can only do a certain job under the contract, even though they could be more valuable to the company doing something else, or several other things), contract employees often have little or no understanding of company politics and competition issues (or aren't allowed to know for various legal reasons), so they can't contribute fully in many areas of a dynamic organization, contract employees aren't always trained to the same standard as company employees,....  I could go on.

Bottom line, the accountants (and many so-called business management gurus) sold operations managers and CEOs a bill of goods by claiming contract employees or outsourcing was always good. Sadly many companies were gutted throughout the 90's and lost their critical mass of technical people. Now these companies are entirely beholden to outside contract shops because they have no one left who knows the business, or worse, they are out of business.

The historical perspectives are very interesting. You guys should track down copies of A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System. There are several volumes. I have The Early Years (1875-1925) and it's fascinating reading. I'd like to snag copies that cover the time after 1925.

I think the Federal Government also was in bed with the Bell System and helped it along as a near monopoly for defense/cold war reasons. They wanted to ensure comms, even in the event of war. A significant undoing of this arrangement was also driven by the government - ARPANet, which grew into the Internet. The dispersed infrastructure of the packet-switched approach of the Internet turned out to be far more survivable and self-healing than the much less dispersed infrastructure of the circuit-switched telephone system. Exactly how much this fact drove the government to divest Ma Bell is unknown to me. Could be an interesting study.

[W9GT]

I'm not sure what the others are doing, but Embarq (formerly Sprint local) has been converting their C.O. switches to packet switches at a fairly rapid pace.  Wave of the future....network will be all packet-based and not channel based.  The entire network will someday be IP or similar.   

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Ian VK3KRI]

So the obvious idea of just going digital with the whole PSTN network, adding SS7 signal networking to reduce trunk time usage, pealing off the internet traffic to Cisco routers and a separate packet switching network and DSL service was born, resulting in very low voice band trunk time usage in comparison to the old system. Presto, the modern Digital Public Switched Telephone Network was born. This also confounded and put a stop to development of the dialup modem for faster speeds by putting it in a digital 56kbps time slot in all voice band switching & trunking. So by accident or plan?, the dialup is stuck and can never get any faster.

Here in VK  I was involved in a similar project for similar reasons.(Yes another telco ham) Dial up internat/data calls destryed the usagemodel that the PSTN was designed around.  The solution was eeling dialup traffic out straight of PSTN switches onto E1s into Ascend/Lucent MaxTNTs . Used CCS7  and a central point code as a psuedo node (Not sure if these are the same as US terms ?). This was quite successful nationally, and wholsale access  was sold to companies as well as ISPs competing with the (then Goverment owned) nation carrier.
                                                                          Ian VK3KRI
 

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Then during the dialup period of the internet, the Telcos started having a real problem with switch & trunk occupancy by internet users. The number of 'long duration calls' shot up sharply and PSTN equipment and trunks were being held far too long for the architecture of the system. Some way to get this internet traffic out of the PSTN was badly needed. Packet switching of data was already a known technology, so some interim systems of pealing off the internet traffic were adopted and marketed with many names like 'switched 56k', 'dialup 56k', ISDN, DPN, etc. We had little success with individuals but most were jumped on by business users.

Mack 

As project and product manager (at different times) of the Information Systems Network (ISN), this packet switch collection of products found its way into many large businesses, college campuses, and universities in the 80's. Some of these "campus-like environments produced very large efficient networks within their organization. ISN was born out of the ashes of "NET 1000" which floundered and failed for a number of reasons. ISN was marketed by the AT&T Information System End-User Organization (EUO). The C.O. version was called Datakit and was marketed by AT&T Network Systems.

In the 90's, Datakit re-invented itself as BNS-2000 with a much faster packet switch. A short-lived low cost version, targeted to the existing base of ISN customers as an up-dated and more efficient product, called BNS-1000 never really found favor with existing ISN customers. I was the person in 1995 to finally turn off the lights for ISN by DA'ing (discontinued availability) all the codes. In 1995, I also became the product manager for all the BNS-2000 packet switch products and, one of my last activities before leaving in 2001 was to announce the discontinued availability of all these products. However, the embedded customer base was so strong, that still, to this day, many are still actively using ISN and BNS-2000 somewhere within their network infrastructure.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

That pic of the old Bells Labs horn laying there pointing at the ground is starting to bug me! Wonder how flexible the U.S. Park Service would be to a group of Bell System hams wanting to use it!? MOON BOUNCE!?

Mack

Don't need antennas like this anymore to do moon bounce. With today's hardware and software technologies, you can do moon bounce with simple high gain yagis.

My neighbors would just loved to have seen one of these in my back yard:



Anyone of 6 meter moon bounce:


or this one:

[W9GT]

I'm not sure what the others are doing, but Embarq (formerly Sprint local) has been converting their C.O. switches to packet switches at a fairly rapid pace.  Wave of the future....network will be all packet-based and not channel based.  The entire network will someday be IP or similar.   

73,  Jack, W9GT

Jack, I remember this topic being discussed in some meetings before I retired. I haven't talked to anyone lately but I'm 99% sure everything is still separated here. Internet based to the left & voice based to the right. The 'real time' nature of the voice traffic was also a concern in going to a pure packet switch. There was no way to cover that 'real time' dead spot in audio in a packet hiccup, no problem in data.

Mack

Yeah...I think the term is latency.  Built -in delay or "echo" effect.  But... look at all the VOIP operations that are going on now.  It doesn't seem to be a problem. 

73,  Jack, W9GT

[W9GT]

A contract employee costs significantly less then one on the payroll.

Cost less, maybe, but a better value, often not. Contract employees often don't produce as much as company employees due to lack of buy-in/allegiance to the company, the contract often limits flexible use of the person (e.g. they can only do a certain job under the contract, even though they could be more valuable to the company doing something else, or several other things), contract employees often have little or no understanding of company politics and competition issues (or aren't allowed to know for various legal reasons), so they can't contribute fully in many areas of a dynamic organization, contract employees aren't always trained to the same standard as company employees,....  I could go on.

Bottom line, the accountants (and many so-called business management gurus) sold operations managers and CEOs a bill of goods by claiming contract employees or outsourcing was always good. Sadly many companies were gutted throughout the 90's and lost their critical mass of technical people. Now these companies are entirely beholden to outside contract shops because they have no one left who knows the business, or worse, they are out of business.

The historical perspectives are very interesting. You guys should track down copies of A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System. There are several volumes. I have The Early Years (1875-1925) and it's fascinating reading. I'd like to snag copies that cover the time after 1925.

I think the Federal Government also was in bed with the Bell System and helped it along as a near monopoly for defense/cold war reasons. They wanted to ensure comms, even in the event of war. A significant undoing of this arrangement was also driven by the government - ARPANet, which grew into the Internet. The dispersed infrastructure of the packet-switched approach of the Internet turned out to be far more survivable and self-healing than the much less dispersed infrastructure of the circuit-switched telephone system. Exactly how much this fact drove the government to divest Ma Bell is unknown to me. Could be an interesting study.

Amen....Steve!  You nailed it.  We have seen a transformation in the corporate world that doesn't seem to be good for companies or employees.  There just is not any loyalty anymore....in either direction.  Everything is strictly based on money.  Granted, a corporation's primary goal is to make money for the stockholders, but employees are not just machines or "tools" to be figured into the business equation as just another expense.

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

I'm not sure what the others are doing, but Embarq (formerly Sprint local) has been converting their C.O. switches to packet switches at a fairly rapid pace.  Wave of the future....network will be all packet-based and not channel based.  The entire network will someday be IP or similar. 

This is called convergence (the connecting together and them combining the computer data network with the telephone network). It's already largely happened in the corporate world. Most or all of the major PBX manufacturers offer VOIP capability, even retrofit on older models with new plug-in cards. It's just a matter of time until the telcos go the same route. Much of it is being driven by the data service offered/provided by cell phones.

[WU2D]

We just moved into our new plant (a refurbed building) last Monday.

Bye bye Merlin - hello Cisco VOIP. Actually it is a pretty nice "instrument".

Mike WU2D

[AF9J]

Yep, that's what we have Mike, 

They can occasionally be annoying.  I've lost a few phone conversations, because the phone either briefly lost it's connection, or else the network decided to download some new parameters during the middle of my phone conversation.

Ellen - AF9J

[WA2ONK]

I've been there for almost 34yrs. Started out as a repairman for New Jersey Bell. Then in '84 we became Bell Atlantic, (the decline in customer satisfaction started). Now we are Verizon. I work in the Radio/Video end of the company. When I started in the R/V department we had all kinds of microwave. Analog, and digital was becoming the standard. We also maintained the older IMTS mobile systems, which became obsolete with the cellular introduction.

We had an extensive trunk radio system in NJ and PA, and that's long gone.

 We only have a couple of point to point microwave systems left. We are currently supplying some video circuits via fiber, especially since 9/11 and the FIOS being established in the area.

It's amazing the changes I've seen in the past 34 yrs in the telco industry. Well, they call that "progress", me, I'm not so sure.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

\

I'm sure packet switches have improved since I retired. It's hard for me to imagine packet switches capable of the 'real time reliability' needed for some services.

This is handled with managed switches and Quality of Service (QOS) levels and schemes. Still not the same as a circuit switched connection but close, if done correctly.

[W9GT]

I've been there for almost 34yrs. Started out as a repairman for New Jersey Bell. Then in '84 we became Bell Atlantic, (the decline in customer satisfaction started). Now we are Verizon. I work in the Radio/Video end of the company. When I started in the R/V department we had all kinds of microwave. Analog, and digital was becoming the standard. We also maintained the older IMTS mobile systems, which became obsolete with the cellular introduction.

We had an extensive trunk radio system in NJ and PA, and that's long gone.

 We only have a couple of point to point microwave systems left. We are currently supplying some video circuits via fiber, especially since 9/11 and the FIOS being established in the area.

It's amazing the changes I've seen in the past 34 yrs in the telco industry. Well, they call that "progress", me, I'm not so sure.

Great to hear about another radio and video guy!  I was a Transmission Engineer-Radio and Video for GTE up until the late eighties.  I served as the frequency coordinator and did all the FCC filings for the Indiana company.  Designed systems and coordinated projects for pt to pt microwave, IMTS, two-way maintenance radio, and paging systems.  I also was involved in provision of video pick-ups from sporting events, etc. for the national TV networks utilizing portable microwave systems and video cable systems.  Worked on some of the first fiber optics projects in the US, including early digital video stuff.  I also worked on the national task forces that  established GTE Mobilnet (now Verizon Wireless).
Yes....times have certainly changed!!  It was a great run, and a really interesting career, but technology certainly has evolved since those days.

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Carl WA1KPD]

Americans must be getting less aware concerning the privacy of their communications, I hear some interesting conversations from those walking around on Bluetooth these days!

Mack     

Mack,
Do you mean you monitor the BT freq? or overhear the conv as they walk around?