25 years ago today

[kv5e]

Galaxy IV failed and if you had a paging base station with a Channel Master dish that was shared with other carriers you got screwed today along with having to realign all of your satellite endpoints.

There were some sites that techs got to the site, ran new IFL cable to their cabinet sat receiver, realigned the dish, got on the air then left for the next site. Since it was a shared dish the next carrier would arrive, run new IFL cable (if you had enough) and move the dish to their recovery satellite, and this would go on for days.

I actually heard Galaxy IV fail when a news broadcast went off the air in the late afternoon when I was working in Phoenix.

Most gas stations had VSATs on Galaxy IV and you had to pay cash or manually charge with a slip in the station to buy gas.

This wasb efore widespread acceptance of cellular phones and it was a pretty big deal.

 

[WB5UOM]

Oh yes- drove all over East and Southeast Texas swapping birds for the one national paging carrier -then got a call from another and off again all over Northeast Texas...got to see the sun come up more than once- but the folk at the various NOC's were jumping for joy every time another site came back up.
Doesnt seem like that long ago.
--then there was this one site we got to at 2am- whoever did the install I guess thought that getting the dish closer to the sattelite was a good thing so they put it up on the tower at 30 feet....

 

[WB5UOM]

and as a side note- Skytell had failsafe dial backup at their sites and never missed a beat and as far as I remember, didnt get any kudo,s for that. We had their downlink terminal at our shop for the longest but towards the downturn of paging they moved it out to the tower to get rid of the circuits from ATT

 

[kv5e]

Pagemart was in the process of moving from G4 to AMC1 and AMC4 2way VSAT so some areas could be turned up immediately.

Lesson learned was to checkerboard between two SVs so if one croaked you still have partial coverage and only have to swing half as many dishes.

I have a t-shirt from Tony Cranston's Radio Exchange (now defunct) in New Brunswick NJ that has a picture of a Channel master 1.2 meter dish on the back with the large letting that says " I survived GALAXY IV!"

 

[WB5UOM]

Dang this is a trip down memory lane...We did service for Airtouch- Pagemart-Skytell-Destineer (which was Skytell 2way) - Radiophone and Im at a loss for others and all but the Goobers from Glenayre that Skytell contracted thru were great to work for/with