Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, AT&T High Seas Transmitter Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009

[mattblaze@federate.social]

Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, AT&T High Seas Transmitter Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009.

All the pixels, no static or fading, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4141766569

#photography

[mattblaze@federate.social]

Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens.

During the 20th century, AT&T operated a shortwave "radiotelephone" service for vessels on the high seas. Ships could contact an operator, who could connect them with any landline telephone number they wished.

The North Atlantic station, callsign WOO, occupied expansive transmit and receive "antenna farms" in marshlands near the shore in central New Jersey.

Rendered obsolete by satellites, the service ceased operation on November 9, 1999.

[mattblaze@federate.social]

There were three AT&T radiotelephone sites in the continental US, each with its own transmit and receive antenna farms: Ocean Gate, NJ (shown here, serving the North Atlantic), Miami (serving the Caribbean and the Gulf), and Point Reyes, CA (serving the Pacific).

All the sites have by now been razed, either for redevelopment or as nature preserves. The antennas (including this one) are mostly gone now.

[mattblaze@federate.social]

Ships on the high seas still occasionally make some use of shortwave radio, but its importance has greatly diminished over the last few decades. The Coast Guard still maintains a "watch" on emergency shortwave frequencies, listening for distress calls, but most transoceanic ships are now equipped with more modern, higher-bandwidth satellite communications systems.

Places like this are what the Internet looked like a century ago. Infrastructure is often heroic, and occasionally looks the part.

[mattblaze@federate.social]

I should note that while the site (and its cousins) had a number of large discone antennas like this one, they were mostly there as backups in case the main antennas (which included truly massive wire rhombics oriented toward various oceanic regions) or transmitter combiners failed.

The old Bell System did not mess around.

[mattblaze@federate.social]

By the way, here's what I believe was the final published frequency list and schedule for the AT&T high seas service, (a souvenir of one of my visits to the station before it went off the air).