[ericwood]

One of my favorite games when traveling is spotting the iconic horn antennas that are still in operation or the various towers that were a part of it. A good chunk of the site are still in active use with all kinds of new equipment bolted onto them, and you can sometimes see holes in the platforms where the original horn antennas used to be mounted.

Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!

There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel

[topspin]

> Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range

In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].

[1] https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters....

[ericwood]

These are super cool and I've never seen one before! I'd imagine most of the passes I'm in are within spitting distance of at least one town so powering a substation isn't out of the question. It seems like most of the installations are very much "middle of nowhere" situations. I hope to run across one of these in person!