In The Cool Of The Night
In WTCI's next gig, less than two months after the President Carter odyssey, Romrell realized it was very late, very damp and very chilly on an October Friday night in North Carolina's Elizabeth City. It was an early-to-bed town with a population of less than 15,000, located 30 miles south of Norfolk-Portsmouth, VA, and less than 20 miles west from the roaring surf of the Atlantic Ocean.
The folks at Elizabeth City State University were told that their home football game against Winston-Salem State University would be televised by a small cluster of ABC's TV affiliates in the southeast region of the United States.
What they did not realize was that Saturday, October 21, 1978, would also provide another milestone for the nascent domestic satellite communications industry: the first-ever live, revenue-producing transmission of a television sports event using a mobile uplink.
(The first domestic satellite transmission of a live sports event, using a fixed uplink, occurred on August 9, 1975-a major league baseball game in Milwaukee that was televised in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. It was arranged by Wold Communications, using the Westar 1 satellite.)
In the Friday night darkness at the parking lot that adjoined an equally dark Roebuck Stadium, capacity 5,000, stood a patient Bill Hynes, the director of telecommunications for ABC-TV, and WTCI's equally patient Romrell. They awaited the arrival from Colorado of WTCI's uplink truck.
The program production crew from ABC, having finished their equipment setup, scattered before dark in search of a local restaurant. Meanwhile, Southern Bell telephone technicians, disappointed that they wouldn't be handling ABC's football telecast, stood by for a frequency coordination with WTCI's still-on-the-road truck.
"Where's That Truck?"
Having watched ABC's production folks head off to restaurants and what Hynes describes as "a taste," he growled at Romrell for the fifth time, "Where's that damn uplink truck, Larry?"
Life was different 24 years ago when cell phones and pagers had not yet been invented. Furthermore, the drivers en route to the rendezvous site did not know the unlisted numbers of the phones in ABC's production truck.
Romrell explained recently that the WTCI truck had been the prototype for a multi-unit contract that Rockwell had with Saudi Arabia. "The Saudis had tested the prototype and decided they wanted Rockwell to build sturdier versions because of their desert terrain," he said. "So we bought the prototype, which we simply named "Transportable Earth Station." (TES had also been the choice of NASA and PSSC.)
It was a unique rig: a standard pickup truck towing a 40-foot flat-bed, low-boy boat trailer on which were mounted a collapsible 4.5-meter satellite uplink dish plus a large oblong fiberglass container filled with ground control equipment (GCE) that included a pair of high power amplifiers with their own drivers and exciters.
The truck's expedition had begun in Denver and wound eastward through six states covering some 1,800 miles. The drivers, who wondered whether they were Lewis and Clark headed in the wrong direction, used phone booths as best they could to report to their Jefferson, who was in reality Romrell.
First, the trailer's tires were too small for the load and began to blow. Romrell replied, "Buy several spares, tie them down in the pickup and keep coming."
When they reported being stopped in various states for possible wide-load violations, Romrell fired back, "Pay the fees and move out. Let's roll."
Among appreciative TV network technicians, the truck became known as "the Bozeman," in honor of numerous WTCI technicians who, like TCI founder Bob Magness and Romrell, had all grown up in Bozeman, MT.
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