Microwave

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The very first microwave I was aware of was East Lansing to Dobie Road, next was at the Alpena post. The tower there was at Hillman hill about 8 or 9 miles from post and the Telco line was fragile at best, that system went in in mid 60's, Dutcher did most of the service on that one and there are stories to be told. There may have been other links when the one in Alpena went in as Evans was enthusiastic about microwave. Harry and I put the big system in between Lansing and Detroit in late 70s. Dave Held (Feb 23, 2009)

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Don't remember exactly when the Travers City post microwave was activated, 79 or 80 I think, maybe later. TC had a private 12 pair control cable from the post to the tower, approximately one plus miles, it had several splices from previous cable cuts over time. It ran down the old railroad grade to the state hospital, then up the hill to the tower behind the hospital. That track was used in the past to haul coal to the hospital power plant. The track was gone when I arrived in TC in 1974, the grade was still there with some encroachment by local business along the way.

The MW was already installed and some testing to it and waiting till spring to switch to it. What triggered this in the first place was when the beaver chewed up the cable. This was in January and took a while to find. Of course it happened on a Sunday, looked at all the cable pairs, all were open! Monday got snowshoes on and went down the buried cable path, checking boxes and finding nothing. Then I saw a black mound ahead me, unusual site in the Jan. snow. Went to take a look, and low and behold there was this big hole and two cable ends, cleanly cut. Armor and all ! It was a hard winter and the beaver was looking for food, guess he thought it was a tree root and had at it.

Then we got the MW. But before it went functional, we had a bad landslide on the hillside, which got the cable again. We did get that temporarily fixed. Then decided now is the time to do the switch and abandon that old cable. Can't remember what time of year, but there was still some snow. And so ended the grief of cable repair in TC. Jack Hengartner (Feb 24, 2009)

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The microwave at Alpena and Marquette was a Farinon. We replaced the Marquette system with GTE microwave when the Negaunee Post was built. We also had a narrow band hop of Motorola microwave that went from Headquarters to the training academy that we ran satellite receivers for the 460 MHz portable system for Capital Security.

The hop from headquarters to Dobie Road was Motorola equipment. There is an interesting story told by Floyd Casteline on that system. When the system was initially purchased and installed, Motorola technicians worked weeks trying to get the short path from headquarters to Dobie Road to work to no avail. They ultimately figured out the radios were on two different frequencies. When they checked further they determined that the reason they were on two different frequencies was
that the shipment got messed up and MSP had one radio for their system and one radio that was supposed to go to Hawaii, and Hawaii had a similar system. Needless to say it took some time to get things straightened out before they finally had microwave communications.

Those radios used a 2 GHz klystron and had a total of four channels. Each channel was in a drawer 19" wide and about 12" high with a gazillion tubes in each one. When a channel went down you just went to each site and looked for dark tubes and started changing. Sometimes finding a number of burnt filaments at a time in one receiver. The four channels were used to control the low band, MEPSS and CID base stations.

There were passive reflectors at each end with the antenna at headquarters on top of the dog house and the one at Dobie Road on the ground. On one occasion not long before we discontinued use of the microwave, (couldn't get parts for it anymore), I had to go to Dobie to see why the microwave wasn't working. As soon as I drove up, I noticed that the painters had been repainting the dog house. In addition to painting the dog house they had painted the rusty antenna bright silver, including the radome. After trying everything else with no success we decided to remove the radome to see if the paint might be our problem. After chiseling dozens of rusty screws, finally got the radome off and abracadabra we had microwave signal again. Harry Warner (Feb 24, 2009)