Built this at North Carolina Works and Merrimack Valley.

When the title said old I was hoping to see vacuum tube equipment! Maybe a Klystron.

please add automatic dubbing

Yea they called me and I talked them through all of it. !

This is how all vidioes should be done. Simple, to the point and no stupid music in it! Well done!

And oh yes thanks for the look inside in a good detailing of the equipment there aren't too many of these around left anymore with the equipment left inside the 10 that pristine condition

I love the fact that they had circuits that could handle all those calls and everything back when they still were using vacuum tubes when the system first came out and was put in operation so that's pretty cool 🙂 I went on a couple of Urban explorer trips and seen some of these towers I would love to be able to rent one for use with some of my hobbies working with like off-grid power supplies and solar panels being in a building that had such cool history like this that would be totally awesome but I don't know who I would contact to find out about it I also wouldn't mind making use of one of the old l3 l4 underground power feed stations some people use them as a bug out bunker but I would just love using it for a cool workspace 😎

"Old school" makes me laugh 😅 I used to work on that stuff ! Retired in 1998 after most were shut down and fiber optics had by then taken over. Ah, the good ol' days...

there are $ thousands in equipment/parts just RIPing....!

I remember in late 90s when AT&T started auctioning off these sites. I wish I had the 10k or so they were going for back then.

That tendency to retire stuff in-situ is real. I once walked through an AT&T rack and found a several U tall single hard disk drive, in 70s brown, still running. Highly doubt anything was actually using it, but nobody dared turn it off lest it break something they would then be responsible for fixing.

The round Bell Cell on the plastic rack was pretty new when I left the plant dept. a long time ago. Nice to see some still in service. Any idea how old those are? I managed to snag some 12' of the old steel WECO battery tray rack that were being scrapped after replacement and they made for some very heavy duty firewood racks. Still have some almost 50 years later.

Maybe I missed it in the video, if the microwave tower is gone, why is all that equipment still inside the building in use? Is that building/equipment now a part of the new fiber optic system?

Where's the Rockwell encabulator? 😅

You really really need to get a label maker and put a tiny little capacity label on those big honking battery cells, to match what you'd see printed on an 18650 flashlight battery. "720000mAh" would be amusing to see ◡̈

OK. I've been fascinated by these LL sites for a few years now, mostly because I love old tech and the secret places regular folks never get to see. If you don't mind me asking, which transceiver site is this? We have one in downtown Oakland (CA) just sitting on the roof of, I think the Wells Fargo building? But what I really want to know is what's in the bunkers. All of these sites were hardened in case of nuclear war. Also, I didn't know you could just pipe microwaves places. I always thought the magnetron lived in the dish. From what I've learned here it makes me want whole house microwave outlets, you know, like the whole house vacuum systems? Want a snack in you bedroom? Grab something outta the cooler drawer and toss it in the zapper node! Man, I miss back when we used to live in the future...

Is microwave radio still used for anything, anywhere in the world?

From the 1950's into the 1990's, the FAA ran Collins microwave gear for sending long range radar data to ARTCC's, and in one case, starting in the late 1960's, ASR8 radar data from Cecil Field NAS, to the JAX Intl. Airport TRACON. In the 90's all this tube type microwave gear, which had been upgraded to using solid state IF strips and modulators, but still relied on Klystrons for carrier freq. and receiver local oscillator, were replaced with AT&T FR8 microwave radio gear, which was purchased from AT&T after it had all be refurbed. The intent was still to get the radar data to those places, along with 900+ telephone circuits with hopes of getting as much of the FAA and other government offices off the Bell System and onto this network, which was nationwide. That plan ran into problem as it was considered competing with a commercial enterprise, but it was still used for FAA inter-facility communication, paths to air to ground comm sites, and still carrying radar data. An early version of DEI related activities in the early 2000's brought the hiring of some really incompetent people into the Washington DC offices of the FAA. They had zero experience with anything concerning the electronic world within the FAA and especially the microwave system the FAA had in place, and started a systematic removal of the system. ARTCC's and TRACONs had redundant paths of telco interconnection, one could be fiber, but the other had to be copper, and they also had to exit a facility in different direction. The microwave system was the backup just in case telco failed. It did in Memphis, a large portion of airspace had to be shut down for an extended period due to a cable cut. There was no longer any microwave backup, and when you looked at the radar for that area when it happened, you had this giant hole with not one aircraft within it, surrounded by hundreds of aircraft outside of that dead air space. I spent almost 40 years in the aviation world, starting in the Navy, and ending up in the FAA. I will never fly in an airplane again. It is not that I don't trust the pilot or the aircraft, it is the big question mark that has become the FAA over the last couple decades.

There is an old one near my hometown on us route 30 headed east towards Gettysburg Pennsylvania

How cool is this?

Didn't know I'd find that interesting but I did. Thank you.

Clearlake Oaks aka Leesville California

I live in Tucson. There is a tower downtown just like the one shown but with a couple of more “antennas” on it. The tower is at least 50 years old. I have been living here since August 1972 and have seen the tower my whole life. I don’t know if the tower is still functioning or not. It may have been shut down. I have no way of knowing. This video is the first time seeing how an array like that operates.

A video on how the old A-B copper cables worked would be interesting. I was a cable locate in the 90s.I remember seeing abandoned A-B long distance copper cables outside of Salt Lake and other places.

How is the odometer all 6's on both the osciloscopes...

My great grandma used to live a couple miles, but within view, of two of these towers (local tv hill we called it). She suffered from Acute microwave exposure syndrome as a result.

SO COOL. Thanks so much for sharing this, amazing!

Doesn't your ATS let you simulate loss of commercial AC? Those big old breakers don't like being cycled too much.

Is this unit still being used?

I remember dealing with these as they interfered with C-Band satellite dishes. Today, C-Band satellite has been shutdown and now reallacted to cellular use. Would be great to reporpus two towers as a 5GHz wifi link. As the wave tubes can handle anything higher then 3GHz.

Very cool. Thanks for posting👍

Cool!

and a magic the gathering shop with an Electra and military crystals or a Harley shop......playing dynasty.. with a Mercedes. they claimed that sh*t was zero day all the way up to dumping the gear during the wall street riots on a new generation to go no where...... they tried to retire on the scam and expect metv morals to pick up the check.

Has equipment running but no tower?

I worked as a system test technician at Farinon Microwave in the 80s when they produced those 4GHz SS4000 radios for AT&T for their long haul microwave networks. It was a golden age for microwave transmission in the US.

They used nitrogen to keep cables dry.

Cool haven't seen SimCopter in years. There is an easter egg, if you build a city with a military base and land there an armed Apache will be available to use. Yes you can shoot and blow things up.

How about some explanation about how this works?

Those digital multiplexer cards are still in use in a lot of places, and there are hundreds of Central Office techs that would *LOVE* to get their hands on them. You see, there are some customers out there who simply flat out refuse to join the 21st Century? Like the *FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.* _stares meaningfully_ Those guys just luurrrve them their 64k and T1 digital links, so their field agents have *_radio_* coverage wherever they go. So even though poor schlubs like me kept pushing management to refuse to keep servicing those systems, upper management kept saying, "Line must go up!". Annnnd the *FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION* is allowed to keep using the smoke signal boxes on their hips. I don't work in that field anymore, but yeah, there's a lot of techs who would love to get their paws on those cards to replace the ones that burned out on their systems.

@FDR Retro Gaming & Tech - Be very careful of those wave guides. Many of them were not copper or brass, they were Beryllium Copper which are VERY TOXIC. Beryllium is a toxic metal and they will tell you NEVER to burn it or torch it or cut it with a saw and make grains or dust. It is dangerous in the extreme. You can get very sick from handling it and especially eating drinking or putting your hands in your mouth after handling it. I know some guys who demo'd some sites and cut these wave guys with a torch and almost died. They were really screwed up. That metal is very light and strong but extremely toxic. It is primarily used in spacecraft and high reliability flexible metals. AT&T used it in waveguide because it could take extreme punishment in a nuclear blast and still function. Be very careful when in old sites like this or the Western Union ones. Some of WU's sites were even bigger than the AT&T ones. Uhaul sized dishes, towers you can park multiple cement mixers underneath of, and 6 or more dishes on them. Not as many as AT&T but they do exist. American tower owns many of them today.

Bigger than I thought they would be