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Info on ship- to- shore stations
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Article 1153 in rec.radio.shortwave:
From: winter@apple.com (Patty Winter)
Newsgroups: rec.ham-radio,rec.radio.shortwave
Subject: Interesting posting on ship-to-shore stations
Message-ID: <43895@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 13 Aug 90 04:00:04 GMT
Sender: winter@Apple.COM
Reply-To: [email protected]
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 269
I found this in comp.dcom.telecom and received the author's permission
to repost it to these groups. (He's on the fringes of Usenet and can't
easily post items.) He asked me to mention that although he sometimes
writes professionally on related subjects, this is just a quick sketch
of personal recollections about these stations.
Direct replies should go to Don at his MCI Mail address.
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Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Coastal Telegraph Stations
Date: 12 Aug 90 00:51:00 GMT
TELECOM Digest Sat, 11 Aug 90 19:51:00 CDT Special: Coastal Telegraph
Inside This Issue: Moderator: Patrick A. Townson
Coastal Telegraph Stations [Donald E. Kimberlin]
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Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 09:16 EST
From: "Donald E. Kimberlin" <[email protected]>
Subject: Coastal Telegraph Stations
Organization: Telecommunications Network Architects, Safety Harbor, FL
In article <Digest v10, iss547>, Nigel Allen writes:
>Before INMARSAT began to provide satellite radio service to ships at
>sea, the only way to send a message to a ship was through a coastal
>radio station, either by voice or by telegraph. (I think that teletype
>service was available through Rogaland Radio in Norway, but not in
>North America.) INMARSAT is quite expensive ($12 per minute from
>Canada), but even so coastal radio stations are closing down in the
>U.S.
He further says:
>... Western Union has filed with the FCC to shut down its coastal
telegraph station KFS ... and that ... WPA, WOE, WMH, WSL and KOK
>have already been closed down. No doubt some traffic that formerly
>moved through these stations now uses cellular phones.
And he asks:
>Does anyone know whether there were competitive coastal telegraph
>stations in a given market, or whether such stations had a local
>monopoly?
Well, I have to say "thank you" to Nigel for raising a question near
and dear to my heart that caused an excursion back to a comfortable
past career. I was prompted to answer the question in part from my
personal library and experience, but also to get on the phone to have
a very pleasant chat with my old Almer Mater of international
shortwave radio, WOM at Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Here's an attempt at
summarizing a lot of detail:
While yes, it is true that shore telegraph stations are retiring from
the airwaves, and significant shifts are occurring. Maritime Mobile
Radio using Medium Frequency and High Frequency radio is, believe it
or not, still growing, and MARISAT/INMARSAT are far from supplanting
it. And this in spite of some incursions by cellular radio as well.
First, we must make it clear. Until or unless there comes to pass a
global form of radiotelephony like Motorola's IRIDIUM proposal, there
are vast stretches of ocean reached only by HF radio or INMARSAT. My
phone inquiry to WOM found them very aware of these developments,
revealing they found that while some ships, mostly supertankers,
bought into INMARSAT, the $10 (U.S.) per minute rate compares poorly
with the $4.90 per minute of HF radiotelephone, especially because
INMARSAT bills from the moment of connection while High Seas (HF)
radio makes all calls person-to-person and bills only when the
conversation starts. Apparently shipping companies come to this
conclusion when they get their bills, and find that a call to the
ship's steward for a one-minute talk results in a $100 charge while
they wait on hold for him to be paged to the satellite phone!
What the WOM folk knew was that satellite-equipped ships use
INMARSAT for hard-copy communications, running not only Telex but even
PC's at 64 kilobits off the ship. That's what's killing the shore
telegraph stations.
They're not all dead however, just shrinking back to meet reduced
demand. For that structural background Nigel asked about, shore
radiotelegraph stations in the U.S. grew before there could be any
structure to their sub-industry, mostly as "company" stations. For
example, the origin of TRT Telecommunications, today in Washington,
DC, was as a 1912 ship and shore radiotelegraph operation of the
United Fruit Company in Boston, using 1912's "highest tech" to direct
shiploads of bananas to the best markets while enroute.
That expanded to using radiotelegraph to the plantations in Central
America, and that expanded to TRT becoming the international telegraph
(and sometimes international telephone) company of much of Central
America; the entity on the other end of AT&T's point-to-point HF
radiotelephone from the U.S. RCA, of course, made shipboard radios
for many American-flag ships (remember that David Sarnoff, builder of
the RCA empire, was first a Marconi Corp. ship's radio telegrapher.);
the result was RCA building a string of shore telegraph stations for
its customers. And, the RCA shore stations operated radioteletype as
a service to promote sales of shipboard RTTY gear. ITT got into the
act by owning Mackay Marine, which competed with RCA for maritime
radio equipment and services, and so had a string of stations, too.
There was no territorial or service monopoly. In fact, just the
opposite seems to have happened, and caused some significant words in
the (U.S.) Communications Act of 1934, to the effect that (sic) radio
stations for public correspondence must accept communications and
traffic from any mobile station, because the "company" stations had,
in fact, refused to answer calls from (even distressed) ships of other
companies. What developed from that point was an interesting form of
competition of many years' duration. The shore stations did compete
with attempts at camraderie and service in ways only telegraphers
could understand. Imagine if you can, an unseen, unheard person on
shore exuding warmth and personality via a telegraph key ... and they
did.
Despite the shrinkage of the number of radiotelegraph shore stations,
the remaining ones seem to be enjoying growth by picking up the slack.
For example, WPD at Tampa, FL seems to still be going strong,
independently owned as it has always been, handing its traffic off as
domestic telegram and Telex messages (that have now largely become
E-Mail with PCs). One of the other "company stations" that never
operated maritime traffic, the Trans-Liberia Radiotelegraph Company
(built by Firestone solely to communicate with its plantations in
Liberia) seems also to still be in business from Akron, Ohio ... but
has been off HF radio for many years, and is now largely a message
center with a couple of PCs ... but you could, if you wanted to, send
a telegram to Liberia via Trans-Liberia!
As to the telephone business, INMARSAT, as noted, may have made some
market, but it seems to be rather insignificant to WOM and it
companions. Their market still grows. AT&T has operations at WOO near
New York, WOM near Miami and KMI near San Francisco. The single most
significant part of the traffic is cruise ships, that enjoy handsome
profit margins on phone calls to shore for passengers. It's known
that one cruise line tells passengers they are on satellite, and
charges $30 per minute, while putting the calls on HF radio (yes, HF
can sound mighty good, running SSB radio with Lincompex) where the
shore station charges $4.90 less a $1 "commission" to the ship!
The surge of technology has helped, with $800 SSB transceivers, so
that small ships and private yachts get on HF radiotelephone, too ...
not wanting to pay the price of a satellite shipboard station and then
the per-minute rates. They have fueled the surge in minutes, along
with ... of all things ... aircraft! The WOM folks handle a fair
amount of calls for private aircraft, notably some Venezuelan oil
company planes that travel from South America across the Atlantic and
Africa to Saudi Arabia. Some few "hep" international airline captains
have even found their HF transceiver can get them a phone call to home
while crossing the Pacific at 35,000 feet!
The result is that WOM alone of the three AT&T stations is handling
about 700 revenue-producing calls a day. And, the traffic of the one
privately-owned U.S. station for international telephone traffic, WLO
at Mobile, Alabama seems to also be healthy.
The standards bodies seem to sense this growth, for in 1991, the
channel assignments for HF maritime radiotelephone use will be
restructured again, with narrower channel widths (2.8 kHz) to create
more channels.
As mentioned earlier, the sub-industry is restructuring, in some cases
with technology old-timers could never comprehend. A major change has
been and continues toward automating and reducing overheads by
consolidation. As I write this, work is underway to consolidate the
control point for NY's WOO in the WOM control room at Fort Lauderdale.
Similarly, the local telcos who always ran the medium-frequency (2
mHz) Coastal Harbor operations abandoned them with demonopolization,
and WOM took over Miami, Jacksonville and Charleston, SC, running the
whole works with the WOM callsign and 10KW transmitters, while the
receivers along the shoreline are wired to Fort Lauderdale.
The communications technology behind it is in some ways awesome, in
others what we should simply expect. The WOM location in Ft.
Lauderdale is 50 miles from its transmitters in Pennsuco, west of
Miami, while the actual landline telephone operators all the ships
speak to are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania! Not such a feat when you
find out that the building is also AT&T's fiber POP for Ft. Lauderdale
and WOM enjoys its own whole fiber route direct to Pittsburgh!
Meantime, control of the transmitters is by PC messages shot around
AT&T's packet data net to turn a transmitter on or off or change its
antenna ... no clunky old "control circuits" at all; instead messages
from a 3B1 UNIX machine (yes, they are planning to get 3B2s) that go
on a packet network to be read by similar machines with control
interfaces at Pennsuco (and soon, Manahawkin, NJ for WOO ... with KMI's
Dixon, CA transmitters a likely addition someday).
And, HF radiotelephone even has its disaster function. During
Hurricane Hugo's trip through the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico last
year, the first restoration of telephone connections to the U.S. was
from ship radiotelephones there to WOM for several days. Of course,
the world gets little news from the networks about such undergirdings
of telecommunications. If people had wanted, they could have as well
made phone calls into the U.S. telephone network (and thus the world)
via WOM in the Mexico City earthquakes. FCC rules do permit doing
ANYTHING with a radio transmitter if it is for the safety of life and
property ... but that doesn't mean calling to see if Uncle Fred's
attic window got broken, it means serious PUBLIC safety.
Oh, the cellular incursion. Yes, it's there, but again not that
significant to a growing market. First, cellular of course, reaches
only incidentally a few miles offshore. There are automated VHF
marine-band dialable shore stations that do reach seaward, but perhaps
only 50 miles offshore. Run by a private company in Hollywood, FL,
these similarly are remote controlled from that city, even though they
range along the whole coast. And, in the Bahamas Islands group there
are reported to be two cellular companies among the islands,
Cruise-Phone and Boat-Phone. They serve an obvious purpose for
boaters sailing among the thousands of Bahamas Islands, but only
there.
Growth seems apparent in other areas, too. St.Thomas in the Virgin
Islands has HF voice station WAH that is growing, as do several of the
other nations' Caribbean islands ... French, Dutch, English and so on.
And, of course, around the world, there are the established stations
of many nations. The "territorial monopoly" is rather interesting
when the Laws of Physics interfere. It's very difficult for nations
to legislate what shore station a vessel calls ... even though some do
force it economically, witness the Cuban shore stations with their own
and Russian ships, plying the same waters, but never getting on the
channels of the American stations, even though they easily can.
So, I hope this is the kind of response Nigel wanted. It's a peek into
another galaxy of telecomm that most people don't even know exists or
thinks is dead is the kind of response you wanted. From the figures I
got today, it's another telecom business that grosses at least $15
million a year, and perhaps several times that.
And, since this peek got so long, here's a vignette learned yesterday
from the WOM Technical Operator I chatted with. We were comparing
stories about handling REAL emergency traffic, as anyone who has done
that job has done, as he gave me a real side-splitter.
Seems he worked the third shift for a couple of years, and in the
darkest hours of night, traffic tends to be nearly zero. However, one
night at 3 AM, he heard a whispering voice on the speaker of his
calling receiver saying, "Hello? Is anybody on here?" He lit up a
transmitter and answered, whereupon the caller identifed himself as a
ship and said, "We are under attack by the Indians!"
What? A ship at sea under Indian attack? What it turned out to be
was s small freighter that had run aground on remote shoreline of
Nicaragua, and the natives were boarding the ship and stealing
everything in sight! Not daunted by this at all, the WOM T.O. called
the U.S. Coast Guard District Office to find out what support was
available, and within a short time the Nicaraguan National Guard was
dispatched to quell the Indian uprising.
If you think, "Having that job must be a ball," you're absolutely
right. Many is the time I've thought I should have stayed there.
Pity it's only one that employs a handful of people. Oh, it's not a
"secret" place although not in tour books. Located at the corner of
State Road 7 and Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, just look up
AT&T Company and give 'em a ring if you want to visit!
[Moderator's Note: *Thank you* for a very interesting and informative
article. I'm sure you are correct that this is a form of
telecommunications very few people know anything about. I hope your
article has educated a few of our readers today. PAT]
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End of TELECOM Digest Special: Coastal Telegraph Stations
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