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Show Mountain States to Start New Microwave Relay For TV Programs Television programs will be beamed through this area over a new 5V2 million dollar 500-mile microwave relay route between Salt Lake City and Turquoise, Calif., late this month, Gerald Vickers, manager of the Mountain Moun-tain States Telephone and Telegraph Tele-graph Co., said today. Ten of the 16 intermediate relay re-lay stations were built in Utah by the Long Lines Department of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. The new route is initially equipped for television and can be adapted to carry large volumes vol-umes of long distance telephone communications. It joins a major southern and major central transcontinental trans-continental communications route. The Mountain States Co. plans to use the new system to increase long distance telephone circuits between Southern Utah and Salt Lake, Mr. Vickers said. The steel tower and 1000-foot poured concrete building six miles southeast of Milford houses hous-es the latest Bell System electronic elec-tronic apparatus to boost radio microwaves carrying network television tel-evision programs. D. L. Clark, Long Lines Central Cen-tral Office supervisor in Milford, explained that the 50-foot tower supports four giant scoop-shaped I antennas. These antennas work like spotlights, but instead of focusing fo-cusing light, they aim microwaves. micro-waves. - "Microwaves fade rapidly and do not follow the curve of the earth," Mr. Clark said. "Relay stations, such as the one near Milford, must be spotted about (Continued on Back Page) Here's More Aboui ' ' Mountain States Continued from Page One every 30 miles in a direct line-of-sight along the route. "One antenna on the tower picks up the microwave," he explained. ex-plained. "The wave travels down the tower through a hollow tube to a sensitive electronic instrument. instru-ment. Here it is amplified about a millionfold and beamed on to the next station through another antenna." Mr. Clark went on to say that a pair of microwave channels, one transmitting in each direction, can carry 600 simultaneous conversations con-versations or, as in the case here, two television programs. The signal is sent to the local television stations for broadcasting broadcast-ing to home sets in their areas. "A radio relay system of this type can be equipped to beam up to 24 radio channels which can carry 6000 conversations at a time," Mr. Clark said. "Several "Sever-al of the channels are held on stand-by duty. These are used for maintenance work and should service become impaired, they automatically and instantaneously instantaneous-ly switch over to carry service." Henger Construction Co. of Dallas, Texas, was contractor for the building. |