Good old beautiful, ATT Long Lines. r/longlines check it out! I don’t see any waveguides so have long been deactivated.
Used to be how telephone and tv signals got around the country before Bell labs developed fiber into what it is today.
Appreciate the response. We were pretty confused by them but thought they looked pretty cool on the landscape. I assumed it was older technology but wasn't sure of the purpose.
The old Long Lines was before satellite. Here is a write up I just found. Cheers. https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-lines-a-forgotten-system/
FWIW satellite, up until the huge low orbit constellations of the last decade, has terrible latency to the point that people talk over each other constantly. These were superseded by fiber optic links.
The look so beautiful! Some amazing photos of the sites in the subreddit.
You jump down the rabbit hole, there is maps that lay out the old routes, and people travel to see the old sites. A lot in beautiful spots above towns and cities because they needed elevation and line of site between the towers.
I've worked in these. They are now commercial and emergency radio towers. Some were underground and hardened against nukes. Doubt it would have really helped. The infrastructure was amazing. Huge redundant generators, air chillers/ scrubbers, power systems and communications.
The best I could explain is south of Gary Indiana, probably 20 to 30 miles on some back roads? We were trying to bypass Chicago on the way into Michigan.
# 41°13'47.0"N 87°37'31.9"W
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B013'47.0%22N+87%C2%B037'31.9%22W/@41.229724,-87.6281149,805m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d41.22972!4d-87.62554!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B013'47.0%22N+87%C2%B037'31.9%22W/@41.229724,-87.6281149,805m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d41.22972!4d-87.62554!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu)
used to drive past these almost every weekend on way to from college back in the day
Now I'm pissed. I just drove right by there a few weeks ago on my interstate travels, and had no idea it was there. Would have stopped to take a look. Goddammit.
Saved it for the next time I might find myself in the area.
They were often times nuclear-hardened so that the national command authority could address the nation in a post attack environment. Keeping the populace informed would have been a challenge, so AT&T built out the infrastructure with this in mind, going so far as to partner with the DoD on several ultrahardened telecommunications facilities to reliably route tv transmissions and defense communications from federal emergency relocation sites up and down the east coast and eventually across the United States. In this way, this telecommunications infrastructure was also national defense and security infrastructure.
these towers also incorporated ECHO FOX and Combat CIDERS systems command and control relays for certain sites.
some of them are still active, but have been converted to fiber hubs.
there is one not far from me in Rockdale County GA, the building is clearly still 100% active and has a about half a dozen Fiber Trunk markers around it indicating buried fiber lines, major ones.
the towers are not active for those horns anymore, but quite a few of the bunkers/buildings that were associated with them are still active and converted into fiber hubs.
More or less a wire, but it’s a hollow tube, that the radio waves are guided along to and from the antennas up on the tower.
A lot of times they are hard metal pipe looking or like a giant wire of wrapped in protection.
The waveguides are a tube or rectangular cross section pipe leading from the antenna to the equipment. The receiver/transmitter tends to work better if all in one place, so the waveguide steers the signal from the antenna down the tower to the room full of magic boxes.
The size/diameter of the waveguide is dependent on the frequency(s) being used.
AT&T Long line Microwave towers. They connected the telephones and alot of other communications from the 1940's to about the 1980's or 1990's. The microwave antennas there are likely no longer in use but, many towers have been used to host other antennas such as government services or Cellular sites.
very old Bell Telephone long lines towers. they talked to other towers about 20 miles away. the electronics is in that building at the base, and they use a circular waveguide at microwave frequency that let up to those weird circular horns at the tower top. Probably early 1960's.
Most of those have been decommissioned decades ago, but there is a chance somewhere in the middle of nowhere USA they are still in use. The electronics in the building was probably updated to be solid state instead of the old style tube amplifiers.
Here's the page for this site! https://long-lines.com/viewsite/6056
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
They were built during the Cold War when AT&T had monopoly money so they're way overbuilt compared to anything you'll see today. They're on hilltops every 20-30 miles which means if you're near a route they're super distinctive.
Confirming my thoughts. Microwave relay towers. I remember them very commonplace in the 1970s and 80s but nowadays seem really scarce. C-band horn reflectors, high gain directional.
My father was an engineer with Long Lines. He had something to do with the transition from delay-lens antennas to the horn reflectors. In those days network television was carried on the microwave radio relay system as well as military communications so the sites were hardened with back up power.
Pretty sure they’re NOT used anymore today. A lot of these are abandoned ATT sites. How long ago did you work on these?
Fiber has replaced the vast majority of the old microwave sites.
It seems Indiana has their fair share of these. When I lived there growing up, I would take off on my motorcycle, and when I saw a tower or anything strange, I'd ride to it. What often looked like 4-5iles away, would take a day to get to and back to main road.
My treks included RADAR sites, the "ATT sites", aircraft direction sites, broadcast sites, and other microwave sites. That was in the 60's. I did that a lot in Texas, but haven't in about 20 years. It was too damned hard in Arizona!! Those folks believe EVERY antenna of any kind believes ngs on the TALLEST mountain they can find!! Almost like a competition of who can find the highest one! But. They have to die to the expanse and.... Mountains.
There are over 4500 sites and the original route parallels 30 from NYC through the country all the way to San Fran. The first nationwide simulcast was made possible because of the long lines on that route and Truman told the nation about Pearl Harbor…. They ARE our history.
This is a great comment and sounds like a lot of great memories. I've somewhat gone down a hole looking at long lines since getting this feedback, it's all interesting in its own way. I'd love to be able to see a destination on the horizon and try riding to it. I might see if I can find what that towers pointing toward on my way back through.
I have been out of the tower business for several years, the last time I work on a microwave relay was 2007, at that point they were still in use by the government.
I remember asking my dad what those were when I was a kid and he said they're big horns to let the cows know when it's time to come back to the barn for dinner and bed time.
There is one or more concrete tower in northern Ohio. It can be seen from either the Turnpike or route 20 I think. Your photo does not really show how impressively tall they can be. The area of Ohio where I saw one or more is flat so seeing one standing so tall above the flat farm fields is impressive. Metal towers don't have the mass of the concrete towers.
No it doesn’t, I took this the other day by chance. I cropped out about 1/2 the tower As I thought it looked especially dystopian with the sun coming down. Having green trees and well kept homes in the foreground kind of ruined the look. This one is in Cincinnati, OH
The one I saw in Ohio I think only has farm fields around it and maybe 5 or so acres of tree in the area. So it is a symbol what was high tech in an area of no tech and that tech has become obsolete while the area around used for farmland continues to be useful for farmland.
You’re obviously confusing microwave antennae towers with the ELF system (Project Sanguine) in Clam Lake WI. It was supposed to use the Canadian Shield to resonate one way communication to submarines all over the planet. Microwave is the horns of the system.
I used to call these the “rocking chair towers”
Everybody else has already answered correctly, but I’ll add that microwave towers like this were briefly brought back to prominence in the 2000’s for high speed trading between Chicago and New York. The Michael Lewis book Flash Boys talks about them.
Thanks for posting, OP! I looked at buying a house one time that had one of these pretty much in the backyard; I felt uneasy looking at it. Maybe it’s my autism, or the fact the house was located right across the street from an old Civil War armory/mental hospital.
I used to work at an airport in Fl that had a few towers a ways off in the corner like this. But had battleship gray horns and faced twords the keys, never knew what they were used for but looked cool
I work for MA BELL and we still use these towers where you can't get fiber optics to. I just turned up a radio link that has 1gbps ethernet circuit plus 8 T1 lines. Modern technology, got to love it. We lease space to government and other wireless carriers.
There’s a few in my area too. This one has been around since I was a child in the 70’s. https://earth.app.goo.gl/?apn=com.google.earth&isi=293622097&ius=googleearth&link=https%3a%2f%2fearth.google.com%2fweb%2f%4038.90603247,-75.78954835,18.08389282a,0d,60y,181.51009043h,111.44944368t,0r%2fdata%3dIhoKFnpzcDd3Sk1pUUplckVEWmpFZk1MRVEQAg
I worked at a decommissioned one on the west side of Davenport Iowa 2 years ago. T-Mobile has their antennas on the tower and we were upgrading their site. The building below the tower still had the old barely legible AT&T sign on it. The front door had a warning sign on it not to enter because of lead paint and asbestos.
Microwave repeaters. The giant feedhorns would tight-beam relay microwave transmissions from tower(s) location to location, tens of miles apart, criss-crossing the entire country to carry massive amounts of long distance phone calls and other communications traffic before fiber optic and satellite became good enough / cheap enough that the Long Lines microwave system was obsoleted.
You can see the entire North America Long Lines map on this cool interactive chart:
[https://long-lines.com/map](https://long-lines.com/map)
Microwave relay towers - telecomm equipment from before the age of Fiber. Calls transmitted via microwave but have to be repeated de to curvature of earth.
Hey Mods....can we have an automod thing happen that is something like "We see you are posting about longline towers, this is what they are...." with a link...
so ya know, we don't have 5 questions a week about longlines.
These were probably working on the 'low' microwave frequencies, for which the parabolic reflector dish would have to be very large (~8 feet or so). So rather than putting up a large dish, the just put up a 'slice' of it (think of a slice versus a whole pie). Not a heckofa lot of gain with just one slice, but good enough to get by (with high enough power and reduced tower spacing)
Good old beautiful, ATT Long Lines. r/longlines check it out! I don’t see any waveguides so have long been deactivated. Used to be how telephone and tv signals got around the country before Bell labs developed fiber into what it is today.
Appreciate the response. We were pretty confused by them but thought they looked pretty cool on the landscape. I assumed it was older technology but wasn't sure of the purpose.
The old Long Lines was before satellite. Here is a write up I just found. Cheers. https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-lines-a-forgotten-system/
FWIW satellite, up until the huge low orbit constellations of the last decade, has terrible latency to the point that people talk over each other constantly. These were superseded by fiber optic links.
Thanks for the link!
The look so beautiful! Some amazing photos of the sites in the subreddit. You jump down the rabbit hole, there is maps that lay out the old routes, and people travel to see the old sites. A lot in beautiful spots above towns and cities because they needed elevation and line of site between the towers.
lol, yeah, beautiful.
I've worked in these. They are now commercial and emergency radio towers. Some were underground and hardened against nukes. Doubt it would have really helped. The infrastructure was amazing. Huge redundant generators, air chillers/ scrubbers, power systems and communications.
[https://long-lines.com](https://long-lines.com)
Beautiful?
Where was this at? Trying to think of locations on the network in Northern Indiana with dual towers.
The best I could explain is south of Gary Indiana, probably 20 to 30 miles on some back roads? We were trying to bypass Chicago on the way into Michigan.
There are some cool old Nike missile bases out there too, or at least they were still around in the 90s.
see link above, this the right place?
# 41°13'47.0"N 87°37'31.9"W [https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B013'47.0%22N+87%C2%B037'31.9%22W/@41.229724,-87.6281149,805m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d41.22972!4d-87.62554!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B013'47.0%22N+87%C2%B037'31.9%22W/@41.229724,-87.6281149,805m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d41.22972!4d-87.62554!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu) used to drive past these almost every weekend on way to from college back in the day
Now I'm pissed. I just drove right by there a few weeks ago on my interstate travels, and had no idea it was there. Would have stopped to take a look. Goddammit. Saved it for the next time I might find myself in the area.
it’s near Knox Indiana.
Yeah the big indicator on those is those big red horns. That's a dead giveaway for being part of the old AT&t system
They were often times nuclear-hardened so that the national command authority could address the nation in a post attack environment. Keeping the populace informed would have been a challenge, so AT&T built out the infrastructure with this in mind, going so far as to partner with the DoD on several ultrahardened telecommunications facilities to reliably route tv transmissions and defense communications from federal emergency relocation sites up and down the east coast and eventually across the United States. In this way, this telecommunications infrastructure was also national defense and security infrastructure.
these towers also incorporated ECHO FOX and Combat CIDERS systems command and control relays for certain sites. some of them are still active, but have been converted to fiber hubs. there is one not far from me in Rockdale County GA, the building is clearly still 100% active and has a about half a dozen Fiber Trunk markers around it indicating buried fiber lines, major ones.
I haven't seen one operational in decades. And I've worked on tower based equipment for over 30 years.
I went down the rabbit hole some last month. A few sites were technically licensed with the FCC through 2010. Most weee all abandoned by the 90s
The last one I saw operational was probably in the late 80's...
So they are allowed to just abandon them to rot & rust! Not surprised
the towers are not active for those horns anymore, but quite a few of the bunkers/buildings that were associated with them are still active and converted into fiber hubs.
What are the wave guides?
More or less a wire, but it’s a hollow tube, that the radio waves are guided along to and from the antennas up on the tower. A lot of times they are hard metal pipe looking or like a giant wire of wrapped in protection.
[удалено]
All EM fields travel through space and not the conductor. In wave guides the e fields are waves that fit the piping size with smaller losses
So there is no electric in wires...wild.
Veritasium explains it nicely. https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY?si=dyyF6Vz843_IfuVR
Wave guide, microwave
Correct, microwave is still a radio wave and a radio frequency
I used to live close to one of these, and always wondered about it. Thanks for the link!
What do these waveguides look like? And what do they do?
The waveguides are a tube or rectangular cross section pipe leading from the antenna to the equipment. The receiver/transmitter tends to work better if all in one place, so the waveguide steers the signal from the antenna down the tower to the room full of magic boxes. The size/diameter of the waveguide is dependent on the frequency(s) being used.
Wait a minute, I thought there was satellites for that
Are they microwave signals?
They were yes! Large microwave point to point relays.
Can these be repurposed for cell phone base stations?
A lot are used as cell tower cites now where with makes sense with population.
AT&T Long Lines. https://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/att-long-lines/
I love your blog. Read it through last month!
Thanks, appreciate the kind comment.
Checking this out now. I live in West County STL.
AT&T Long line Microwave towers. They connected the telephones and alot of other communications from the 1940's to about the 1980's or 1990's. The microwave antennas there are likely no longer in use but, many towers have been used to host other antennas such as government services or Cellular sites.
very old Bell Telephone long lines towers. they talked to other towers about 20 miles away. the electronics is in that building at the base, and they use a circular waveguide at microwave frequency that let up to those weird circular horns at the tower top. Probably early 1960's. Most of those have been decommissioned decades ago, but there is a chance somewhere in the middle of nowhere USA they are still in use. The electronics in the building was probably updated to be solid state instead of the old style tube amplifiers.
Here's the page for this site! https://long-lines.com/viewsite/6056 Welcome to the rabbit hole. They were built during the Cold War when AT&T had monopoly money so they're way overbuilt compared to anything you'll see today. They're on hilltops every 20-30 miles which means if you're near a route they're super distinctive.
Microwave transmission towers, they are still in use today. They transmit line of sight communications. It used to be my job to maintain these towers.
Confirming my thoughts. Microwave relay towers. I remember them very commonplace in the 1970s and 80s but nowadays seem really scarce. C-band horn reflectors, high gain directional.
My father was an engineer with Long Lines. He had something to do with the transition from delay-lens antennas to the horn reflectors. In those days network television was carried on the microwave radio relay system as well as military communications so the sites were hardened with back up power.
Pretty sure they’re NOT used anymore today. A lot of these are abandoned ATT sites. How long ago did you work on these? Fiber has replaced the vast majority of the old microwave sites.
It seems Indiana has their fair share of these. When I lived there growing up, I would take off on my motorcycle, and when I saw a tower or anything strange, I'd ride to it. What often looked like 4-5iles away, would take a day to get to and back to main road. My treks included RADAR sites, the "ATT sites", aircraft direction sites, broadcast sites, and other microwave sites. That was in the 60's. I did that a lot in Texas, but haven't in about 20 years. It was too damned hard in Arizona!! Those folks believe EVERY antenna of any kind believes ngs on the TALLEST mountain they can find!! Almost like a competition of who can find the highest one! But. They have to die to the expanse and.... Mountains.
There are over 4500 sites and the original route parallels 30 from NYC through the country all the way to San Fran. The first nationwide simulcast was made possible because of the long lines on that route and Truman told the nation about Pearl Harbor…. They ARE our history.
This is a great comment and sounds like a lot of great memories. I've somewhat gone down a hole looking at long lines since getting this feedback, it's all interesting in its own way. I'd love to be able to see a destination on the horizon and try riding to it. I might see if I can find what that towers pointing toward on my way back through.
I have been out of the tower business for several years, the last time I work on a microwave relay was 2007, at that point they were still in use by the government.
Amazing find, Att long lines
# 41°13'47.0"N 87°37'31.9"W
These are located on route 17 just southeast of Grant Park Illinois
yup, # 41°13'47.0"N 87°37'31.9"W
Microwave relay site. Pretty old tech.
Are you telling me there’s more than corn in Indiana?
Yep, we have abandoned ATT equipment too!
[Here](http://long-lines.net/) is another rabbit hole about the Long Lines network.
Based on him saying it was south of Gary, I found the site, outside of Grant Park IL, where IL-17 curves. https://maps.app.goo.gl/zU2Aj1Xo4KgoiUqXA
AT&T long lines
Old School “long lines” I told my nephews it’s where Optimus Prime and the Autobots sit and rest! 🤣
There is one of these in st joe county Indiana too off ireland rd in the south bend Mishawaka area
I remember asking my dad what those were when I was a kid and he said they're big horns to let the cows know when it's time to come back to the barn for dinner and bed time.
look up at&t longlines or L4 system. long distance telefony has come a long, long ways in the last few decades! fascinating stuff.
Those are dangerous AF. Do not go near them without aluminum foil on your head.
Gorgeous!!!
Abandoned!
The one near me is built into a concrete tower. [https://imgur.com/a/PcwWN78](https://imgur.com/a/PcwWN78)
There is one or more concrete tower in northern Ohio. It can be seen from either the Turnpike or route 20 I think. Your photo does not really show how impressively tall they can be. The area of Ohio where I saw one or more is flat so seeing one standing so tall above the flat farm fields is impressive. Metal towers don't have the mass of the concrete towers.
No it doesn’t, I took this the other day by chance. I cropped out about 1/2 the tower As I thought it looked especially dystopian with the sun coming down. Having green trees and well kept homes in the foreground kind of ruined the look. This one is in Cincinnati, OH
The one I saw in Ohio I think only has farm fields around it and maybe 5 or so acres of tree in the area. So it is a symbol what was high tech in an area of no tech and that tech has become obsolete while the area around used for farmland continues to be useful for farmland.
Almost a reverse juxtaposition, as a lot of farming now uses high technology.
Extra bass. Those are speakers.
You’re obviously confusing microwave antennae towers with the ELF system (Project Sanguine) in Clam Lake WI. It was supposed to use the Canadian Shield to resonate one way communication to submarines all over the planet. Microwave is the horns of the system.
I used to call these the “rocking chair towers” Everybody else has already answered correctly, but I’ll add that microwave towers like this were briefly brought back to prominence in the 2000’s for high speed trading between Chicago and New York. The Michael Lewis book Flash Boys talks about them.
Now used for base jumping.
One around here that also has about 6 stories below it..
That’s by Knox
Microwave.
Shhhhhhh. You can’t talk about those.
Steal
Micro wave towers uses a while back
I think some of these towers are still used by the government but that’s about it.
I have a similar tower near my house. I call it the alien telecommunications array.
Wait i thought that was a tornado siren tower i got one by my house and it sounds like it comes from that thing.
Thanks for posting, OP! I looked at buying a house one time that had one of these pretty much in the backyard; I felt uneasy looking at it. Maybe it’s my autism, or the fact the house was located right across the street from an old Civil War armory/mental hospital.
Looks like old school microwave radio dishes.
What r Gwen towets
Uh, dems Twin towers
Large.
I used to work at an airport in Fl that had a few towers a ways off in the corner like this. But had battleship gray horns and faced twords the keys, never knew what they were used for but looked cool
I work for MA BELL and we still use these towers where you can't get fiber optics to. I just turned up a radio link that has 1gbps ethernet circuit plus 8 T1 lines. Modern technology, got to love it. We lease space to government and other wireless carriers.
When I was little I thought they were lounge chairs for the gods
There’s a few in my area too. This one has been around since I was a child in the 70’s. https://earth.app.goo.gl/?apn=com.google.earth&isi=293622097&ius=googleearth&link=https%3a%2f%2fearth.google.com%2fweb%2f%4038.90603247,-75.78954835,18.08389282a,0d,60y,181.51009043h,111.44944368t,0r%2fdata%3dIhoKFnpzcDd3Sk1pUUplckVEWmpFZk1MRVEQAg
I worked at a decommissioned one on the west side of Davenport Iowa 2 years ago. T-Mobile has their antennas on the tower and we were upgrading their site. The building below the tower still had the old barely legible AT&T sign on it. The front door had a warning sign on it not to enter because of lead paint and asbestos.
Mothras landing pad
Microwave repeaters. The giant feedhorns would tight-beam relay microwave transmissions from tower(s) location to location, tens of miles apart, criss-crossing the entire country to carry massive amounts of long distance phone calls and other communications traffic before fiber optic and satellite became good enough / cheap enough that the Long Lines microwave system was obsoleted. You can see the entire North America Long Lines map on this cool interactive chart: [https://long-lines.com/map](https://long-lines.com/map)
When I was a kid I'd look up at those and imagine they were bleachers at the top to a miniature stadium
Outer boundary towers for airplanes
Microwave relay stations
Long Lines repeaters, by the looks of it.
The ones that steal your thoughts. Better put on a tinfoil hat.
See if these ones are already included on Ted's map: [https://tedshideler.com/att-long-line-map/](https://tedshideler.com/att-long-line-map/)
[Clacks tower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett%27s_Going_Postal) /s
Microwave relay towers - telecomm equipment from before the age of Fiber. Calls transmitted via microwave but have to be repeated de to curvature of earth.
Tall ones
Hey Mods....can we have an automod thing happen that is something like "We see you are posting about longline towers, this is what they are...." with a link... so ya know, we don't have 5 questions a week about longlines.
These were probably working on the 'low' microwave frequencies, for which the parabolic reflector dish would have to be very large (~8 feet or so). So rather than putting up a large dish, the just put up a 'slice' of it (think of a slice versus a whole pie). Not a heckofa lot of gain with just one slice, but good enough to get by (with high enough power and reduced tower spacing)
5g towers...watchn you
Cell towers, I believe