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For people in the Bay Area, there's one of those towers/installations in Redwood City, it's a large concrete tower there. It's now a data center building. It st

by rx_tx 4y ago

For people in the Bay Area, there's one of those towers/installations in Redwood City, it's a large concrete tower there. It's now a data center building. It still has the microwave horns in it. [1] [1]: https://goo.gl/maps/UfJy2CqyWYgkVUqR7 https://goo.gl/maps/UfJy2CqyWYgkVUqR7

jcrawfordor 4y ago
The Bay Area features several unusual and distinctive microwave sites, far different from the modular construction normally used by AT&T. Part of this is because some of these sites were relatively early ones, part is because of local zoning requirements, and part is because some of them were originally built by GTE. Perhaps the most interesting is the Oak Hill site, which I believe is nearly unique, with just one other of a similar design. The Redwood City site is interesting in its own way, as I believe the building below contained the Redwood City tandem at the time prior to its elimination in favor of a single, very large 4ESS tandem at Oakland. It was not very typical for tandem switches to be colocated with large microwave sites, usually being end offices on the microwave network with only two antennas (tandem offices are typically in large cities so AT&T often used a "city and junction" pattern where the tandem office, named for the city, was an end office on a short leg from a large microwave site on the outskirts of town named city junction). The exceptions tended to be in highly urbanized areas where space was difficult to obtain, or a few odd cases like Mojave where an end office grew over time into a gateway site.
jeffrallen 4y ago
Another interesting one is in Dunnigan, CA: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9MQX23JwKNFymvnz6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9MQX23JwKNFymvnz6 In the satellite photo you can see enormous numbers of portable generators waiting for The Big One. It was presumably out in the middle of nowhere to survive a nuclear attack on San Francisco and Sacramento.

by rx_tx 4y ago

jcrawfordor 4y ago

The Bay Area features several unusual and distinctive microwave sites, far different from the modular construction normally used by AT&T. Part of this is because some of these sites were relatively early ones, part is because of local zoning requirements, and part is because some of them were originally built by GTE. Perhaps the most interesting is the Oak Hill site, which I believe is nearly unique, with just one other of a similar design. The Redwood City site is interesting in its own way, as I believe the building below contained the Redwood City tandem at the time prior to its elimination in favor of a single, very large 4ESS tandem at Oakland. It was not very typical for tandem switches to be colocated with large microwave sites, usually being end offices on the microwave network with only two antennas (tandem offices are typically in large cities so AT&T often used a "city and junction" pattern where the tandem office, named for the city, was an end office on a short leg from a large microwave site on the outskirts of town named city junction). The exceptions tended to be in highly urbanized areas where space was difficult to obtain, or a few odd cases like Mojave where an end office grew over time into a gateway site.

jeffrallen 4y ago

Another interesting one is in Dunnigan, CA: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9MQX23JwKNFymvnz6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9MQX23JwKNFymvnz6 In the satellite photo you can see enormous numbers of portable generators waiting for The Big One. It was presumably out in the middle of nowhere to survive a nuclear attack on San Francisco and Sacramento.