More rememberances from Don Kimberlin
[Editor's note. The Bell System created the finest telephone system in the world, the envy of every nation. But it had its problems like every company and suffered from Dilbert Syndrome from time to time.]
I landed in a really odd corner of the Bell System, in one of only three places they ever ran High Frequency or HF radio. To the vast majority of people in telcos then, "radio" meant terrestrial microwave, and there was little understanding of it.
As an example, perhaps because they had AT&T for the "control office" at Miami, Southern Bell had a Collins microwave with multichannel analog carrier installed between Miami and Ft.Lauderdale. Well, it crosstalked badly and got generally screwed up regularly with people cranking knobs on it. After a couple of years of screwing around with it, and continually having customers writing nasty letters to Southern Bell HQ. the Southern Bell "engineers" at their FL state HQ in Jacksonville,which specified the thing, got someone from Collins Radio to come to Miami. What they found was that over time, as SB had added more and more hardware and carrier to the thing, they had not ordered newer "roofing filters" on the microwave to adapt to the wider modulation needed with higher loading. Getting the proper filters into it cured all the problems in a flash -- after some years of terrible performance and upset customers.
In a similar instance, SB had a number of type ON carrier systems running the 160 miles or more from Miami to Jey West. They were awful - noisy and cross-talking and unstable when the hot Florida sun heated the black PVC clad aerial cable each day. After many years of complaint, we found out that:
1.) Bell Labs never intended the system to accommodate losses for more than 50 miles of cable;
2.) It had devices called "span pads" that effectively were passive equalizers for the aerial cable, but the only span pads ever made for it had been for 22 gauge cable, and the 160 miles of cable was 19 gauge.
Oops!