[BC] MCI Remains

[stanleybadams]

As my buddy Blake Bowers (you owe me coffee and a donut and I owe you a
little history of what you now own) mentioned, MCI also left a lot of sites
and junction facilities in a 'what you see is what you got' condition.
Plenty of lead acid batteries, to start leaking, left to whomever.  But all
of the MW racks were sold to various people (China got some, surplus dealers
got some).  Other parts were scrapped.  I got a fantastic HP Spectrum
analyzer out of it HP 8592 and a really fine Marconi Freq Counter.  

The old 2 GHz MW band had 20 mc of bandwidth per channel as did the 4 GHz
common carrier band.  This could go up to about 1200 FDM (Frequency Division
Multiplex) voice channel per RF carrier.  The 6ghz band was 30 mc wide and
was the 11 GHz and would accommodate up to 2700 CCIT channels (1800-2100
Collins FDM plan) or up to 5400 channels at SSB (two independent sidebands
of FDM).  Digital MW has never been able to get much above 3 DS3's per 30 mc
bandwidth as the compression techniques would be nullified by the greater
sensitivity to RF propagation problems. This was, of course TDM (Time
Division Multiplex), AM transmission by I and Q quadrature modulation with
suppressed carrier.

The early AT&T MW stations used Bell and Collins equipment.  However their
early FDM was not quite as robust (channel wise) as the later FDM used by
MCI and others.  But some of their later routes had the full amount of CCIT
channels as they used the new equipment to supply the need.

Gosh, I still wish I had a string of sites to keep up.  What a great job it
was, now almost 25 years ago.  Almost as much fun as being a one man
engineer full time at a small station.  You felt like you owned the place.

Stan "Mr. MCI" Adams
Memphis