Driving The First Uplink Rig
Aisenbrey recalls that, "The light weight modified boat trailer, to which I had objected, broke down before we had even left the New York area. We had to change to a 33-foot double-drop trailer to have any chance of making it to Kansas City."
Knowing that assembly of the antenna by a five-person crew would require a full week, Aisenbrey arrived in Kansas City well ahead of the convention's opening. "Soon," he adds, "the convention center's officials realized how many VIP parking places we were occupying and ordered us to move to an area that was a full microwave hop away."
Because the pioneering rig was not really fit to be transportable, and WU's corporate labor agreements made the project very expensive, it subsequently became a fixed antenna for WU in McLean, VA, serving the Washington, DC, market. From there, it took one last journey to a lock-down in the Atlanta market. The project's cost, according to a former WU executive, was "just south of a million dollars."
WU proceeded to build large, fixed, C-band earth stations near several major cities but did not invest in the ownership of any more transportable rigs.
PSSC'S NASA Vehicles
Beginning in 1973, NASA based a small group of earth stations in Denver, CO, to be used for public service demonstrations. At the time, the U.S. space agency was involved with America's experimental ATS 6 satellite, to be followed by involvement with Canada's CTS experimental satellite.
The Public Service Satellite Consortium (PSSC) was created in 1975, and its work included the managing of NASA's earth station assets at Denver. In 1977, NASA constructed an 18-wheel vehicle sporting a 5-meter uplink antenna to join the Denver fleet. The new truck was known simply as the "TES--Transportable Earth Station."
According to Lou Bransford, the PSSC chief at Denver who would later become the non-profit organization's president at its headquarters in Washington, DC, hundreds of C-band uplink and downlink demonstrations were completed between 1977 and mid-1979, when the ATS 6 and CTS programs were both discontinued. PSSC was then enabled to market transportable uses in a commercial fashion and the TES design was acquired by Southern Satellite Systems (SSS) for a CNN transportable that would begin service in mid-1980.
The original TES was sold in the mid-'80s to a New England horse racing track, presumably to receive and transmit simulcast race programs.
Bransford is now the chairman and CEO of Esatel Communications in Alexandria, VA.
WTCI'S Blue Ribbon
Of the handful of pioneering mobile uplinks during 1976-79, the truck acquired by Western TeleCommunications Inc. (WTCI) was clearly the blue ribbon winner.
It was readily accepted by the TV broadcast networks, in part because WTCI was indeed no stranger to the networks. Since 1956, it had been a licensed interstate common carrier and for years had relayed affiliate feeds of all three commercial networks, as well as those of major radio networks, from Omaha westward through Nebraska into Colorado, the western Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah.
Beginning on August 22, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter with his wife and three children spent eight days vacationing in Idaho and Wyoming. The President wanted privacy but 100 reporters and photographers tried to follow him and his family throughout a three-day rafting trip down the Salmon River, followed by a stay at a rustic lodge at Jackson Lake in the Grand Teton National Park.
NBC was in charge of arranging pool transmission facilities for all three networks. When AT&T and Mountain Bell could not provide needed terrestrial facilities at a reasonable cost, the networks agreed to depend on the new transportable uplink truck owned by WTCI.
Other than WU's work in Kansas City two years earlier, it was the first-ever commercial satellite news gathering effort that used a transportable uplink.
WTCI's parent was TeleCommunications Inc. (TCI), which became the nation's largest cable-system operator and was eventually sold to AT&T for $44.57 billion. In addition to its terrestrial facilities, WTCI had for years been interested in expanding into satellite communications.
In the early 1970s, when the FCC was inviting qualified applicants to own and operate domestic communications satellite systems, WTCI applied. Its financial and technology partner was to be Rockwell International, but according to Larry Romrell, who was WTCI's executive vice president, "Rockwell had to back out. They had just received a huge government contract involving the future space shuttle program, and they felt they should put all their concentration on that. So we at TCI decided not to proceed with the satellite plan. Rockwell made us whole, financially, but we withdrew our application to the FCC."
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