Registered Address                                                                                                                                                         

805/41 Meredith Street. Bankstown.  NSW 2200

ISSN 1322 1906

Volume 14 page 22       August 2013

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OFFICE BEARERS

President PETER BULL

President@OTVA.COM

 

Secretary:Will WHYTE

Secretary@OTVA.COM

 

Treasurer: Vacant

Treasurer@OTVA.COM

 

Editor:Henry Cranfield

 

New Membership Classification. Membership is now available at a one-off cost of $50 to any person wishing to join the OTVA and they will then be a full member for the rest of their days or as long as the OTVA exists as an association without having to pay any future membership fees. Enduring Membership is open to all applicants irrespective of whether they receive correspondence via email or via Australia Post.

For the purposes of balancing the books of the OTVA and accounts management required by the Auditors it is difficult for the Treasurer to give members credits for current membership which is paid up in advance. Those members who are paid up in advance will have to wait until their membership fees are due before they can pay their $50 for Enduring Membership.

(i) Either do an electronic funds transfer of $50 to the OTVA Bank account

(email president@otva.com to obtain the details), OR

(ii) Mail a cheque for $50 to

PO Box 702 Riverwood 2210

For EFT transactions ensure your name is included in the transaction.

Once the electronic funds transfer has been completed take a snapshot of the payment confirmation section of your computer screen and email it to treasurer@otva.com

.__________________________________

O.T.V.A Web Site: WWW.OTVA.com

___________________________________-

OTVA Membership Subscriptions.

$10.00 P.A. is due in May each year. The date your membership expires is indicated by”5/13″or earlier. Mail address for subs payment is:

PO Box702 Riverwood NSW 2210

Or email to president@otva.com  for electronic funds transfer details.:

In this issue

Pp.   23  President’s  Address to AGM.

Pp    23  Telex Exchange Memories.

Pp    23  2013-14 Committee Members

Pp.   24   Sir Ernest Fisk and “The Spirit World “

Pp.   26 History of  Guam   Communications

Pp.   27 Pennant Hills. Transmitting site.

Pp   28 Compac Memories

PP   30 Installation Anecdotes

(Due to unforeseen circumstances President Peter Bull was unable to attend the AGM;  herewith his proposed address(ED)

 PRESIDENT’s Address.

Welcome all to the 2013 Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the Overseas Telecommunications Veterans Association (OTVA).

Please join with me for a minutes silence for our friends and colleagues that passed away in the last 12 months. I apologise for not attending the AGM with you today but it is difficult for those of us that are still in the work force to attend every OTVA function. I think that I have only missed one other function since joining the committee so my record is not too bad. I thank you, the membership of the OTVA for the support that you have given to me and the other members of the OTVA Committee over the past 12 months. Your support & encouragement is vital to keeping the OTVA active and relevant in today’s hectic life style. I thank my fellow Committee members for the encouragement and support that they have given to me over the past 12 months. Together with their selfless dedication to you, the members of the OTVA, we have been able to continue to deliver benefits to our members. The OTVA Newsletter continues to provide readers with interesting and topical stories but our Editor is finding it increasingly difficult to publish what you, our members, fail to provide. You must have some interesting stories that can be published in the newsletter for the enjoyment and nostalgia of the newsletter’s readers. Please support your committee and fellow members by submitting those stories that you have filed away in your memory banks,

The email distribution of stories and events continues to be beneficial by attracting more and more members whose membership may have lapsed and attracting new members.

The OTVA web site which continues to provide members with greater access to communications with each other and access to information & stories considered relevant to continuing to tell the story of OTC and the history of telecommunications in Australia, We thank Bob Emanuel for the service that he has performed whilst editor of the OTVA Newsletter. Bob has chosen to step down to enable him to focus on his interests in the Blue Mountains that are closer to home. Your committee is seeking a replacement for the position of Newsletter Editor. It is not an overly onerous role for someone who is well organised and used to writing reports. Without an editor the Newsletter will cease to be issued every 3 months.

Your OTVA Committee for 2013-14

Col Kelly, Ray Hookway, Kevin O’Brien, David Richardson, Bernie White, Allan Hennessey, Henry Cranfield, Bob Emanuel, Will Whyte and Peter Bull.

Telex Exchange Memories.

By Brian Collath

As was the case back ages ago, Telex Exchange staff had two carbon copy books on the TO2 desk. One being the daily Log Book and the other the Fault Log.

The originals were torn out and placed in a case to be sent to HO every morning. This was the duty of the Midnight Shift as the last thing they did before 7:00 am. Also in the case was various pen recorder charts rolled up. This was the joy of HO staff in Telex Ops to open up every morning to see what happened and to gather statistics for Telex Traffic, etc This is probably bleeding obvious to other areas, as they did it too. But this leads into the story below because you can appreciate that our technical world was full of abbreviations and mnemonics, like ARM, FIR, FUR, FDR, RM, TT, SCC Power (Sydney County Council). One day, Greg Martyn was on the way to work for the day shift, and he spotted an injured Cockatoo on the side of the road. He gathered it up and bought it to work for it to possibly recover.The team embraced this cause to the extent that it eventually recovered and was released.Every day in the log an entry was made ie. SCC down, then SCC getting better, then SCC better still, SCC up, then SCC released. I would not be surprised if there was an entry, SCC eating well. Ordinarily, SCC Down would mean Power fail, SCC Up would mean Power restored, but in this case of the Cockatoo it meant Sulphur Crested Cockatoo Down, or Sulphur Crested Cockatoo getting better, and finally he was released. Anyway, after a couple of days, HO Telex Ops could not resist in asking us what “getting better” meant.  Thankfully they (HO) saw the lighter side of it.

Sir Ernest Fisk and ‘The Spirit World”

Our thanks to Trevor Thatcher for his efforts and our apologies for having to undo some of his original formatting. Editor.

The following item is based on an ABC Radio programme and the comments are those of Trevor Thatcher to whom goes a vote of thanks for his effort. It seems radio in the time of the item was seen as an actual science? It was a particularly interesting and entertaining programme, which I am sure that those of you who listened would agree.

Sir Ernest Fisk and the Spirit World: Trevor Thatcher has offered the following comment on the recent alert from Noel Sutherland about the ABC Radio National ‘Hindsight’ program acknowledging the centenary of AWA called: ‘Empire State: Ernest Fisk. For those who may be interested, there is one particular brief segment of the programme that touches on Sir Ernest views on communication with the spirit world. A friend of mine, David Harding (VK2AIF), who worked for AWA in the 1940’s at their Alexandria site, also heard the programme. Mention of communication with “the departed, triggered off memories of one particular event that Dave recalled. It was the publication of a related article in the now defunct “Radio News” magazine that was produced in the USA for much of the 1900’s. Dave was lucky enough to have many volumes of that magazine in his memorabilia closet, and he browsed through them and found the article in the June 1944 issue, on page 37! He allowed me to make a copy of the item for distribution to interested parties. Unfortunately, the massive bulk/weight of the Volume 4 prevented me from getting it into a position for scanning, so I undertook to do a manual “mock up” of the panel. Every attempt was made to preserve (as closely as possible) the original appearance of the item, including the red frame, the spelling, punctuation and phraseology used in that era. Further, I accidentally stumbled across a news item in Perth’s “The West Australian” of 7th February, 1944. This item was devoted to the responses from Perth “medical and scientific authorities” who were aware of Sir Ernest’s apparent expectations of the potential for future radio

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Item from magazine Radio News, ex USA, June Issue 1944 Page 73

SUGGESTS DEAD MAY BE REACHED BY RADIO WAVES.

Australian’s Theory Will Be Probed by Scientists If He Can Show “Life” Exists After Death-

When Sir Ernest Fisk, managing director of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd Australia’s No. l radio scientific executive, said he was convinced of the possibility of radio

communication with the dead, the Australian Association of Scientific Workers offered to investigate the theory, provided Sir Ernest produced evidence of “life” after death.

Said Prof. V. Bailey, head of the experimental Physics Department at SydneyUniversity, and a member of the association: “It would be hard to get in touch with dead people unless they have radio receivers.”   Addressing the Legacy Club at Sydney, Australia, recently, Sir Ernest said he did not wish to be dogmatic, but evidence was accumulating, as a consequence of study by leading physicists, that the spirits of the dead inhabited the ionised either beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and that eventually there might be discovered a wave length which would make communication with them practicable.    “Highly scientific people are now satisfied,” he added, “that the whole universe is one unit, planned by one designer.” He said he was not speaking either as a religious man or a church member, but he was convinced that friends and relatives of war prisoners could bring them some consolation by using their minds and spirits to reach those of the prisoners through earnest prayer.

Dr. S. L. MacIndoe, president of the Association of Scientific Workers, said: “If Sir Ernest is able to produce genuine evidence of survival after death, my association,

composed of more than l,000 scientific workers, will be glad to investigate such evidence.

“The association will also examine any evidence if such exists, which would remotely suggest the possibility of communication with the departed. In the absence of such evidence, Sir

Ernest is as entitled to a personal opinion as any other private individual. But his ideas cannot be associated with scientific knowledge which requires some factual basis or experimental evidence.

—————————————————–Extract from The West Australian (Perth — Monday 7th February 1944)

”SPIRITS OF DEAD.”  CQMMUNICATION SCOUTED.

“No Scientific Proof.”

Medical and scientific authorities in Perth, as far as can be gathered from inquiries made,completely dissociate themselves from the views expressed in Sydney last Thursday by the managing director of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), Ltd, Sir Ernest Fisk, on the possibility of communication with the spirits of “departed comrades.” Sir Ernest said that he did not wish to be dogmatic, but that evidence was accumulating, as a consequence of study by leading physicists, that the spirits of the dead inhabited the ionised ether beyond the earth’s atmosphere and that eventually there might be discovered a wave-length which would make communication with them practicable.

“Utter nonsense,” was the comment of Dr S. E. Williams, physics lecturer at the University of Western Australia, on the published statement. “The claims put forward by so-called spiritualists at various times have never stood up to scientific tests. Sir Oliver Lodge and a medical man in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle certainly had some such beliefs and Faraday also belonged to some queer sect called the ‘Sandemanians.’ However, these men were exceptions and the overwhelming number of scientific men have been extremely rational in their outlook generally.

“The views expressed by Sir Ernest Fisk, while obviously not intended to give pain, are most regrettable at the present time when so many people have lost loved ones. The opinions have no scientific basis and will only serve to raise false hopes.”

“Sir Ernest Fisk, it must be remembered,” said Dr Williams, “is not a research scientist, but a company director. He may have had some technical training in his earlier days, but his acquaintance with current scientific developments has been second-hand, at least for the last 30 years. His company employs scientific workers, some of whom have been trained in this State.

“Possibly by ‘physical world’ Sir Ernest meant those regions physically accessible to human beings at the present time; but if he meant that Radar provides access to a supernatural world of spirits he is talking rubbish. Sir Ernest shows that he is at least 40 years behind in his physics by speaking about the ether in the way he does. The subsequent 40 years of advancement in radio technique have provided no evidence whatever either for the ether or for such statements as he has made.

“Similar outspoken comments were made by leading Perth doctors. “We agree entirely with Dr Williams,” said a representative of the British Medical Association. “Spiritualism is on a par with astrology and there is not the slightest evidence to support it.” He conceded that there were some sincere believers. Unfortunately these were often imposed upon by charlatans and confidence tricksters.

History of Guam:   The Pacific Communications Center.

From 1864 to 1976 by Henry Cranfield

The early settlers on Guam are said to have come from South-east Asia 4000 years ago and the first Western discoverer was the Portugese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. The island was claimed by Spain along with the Philippines in 1565 but not colonised by them until 1668 and remained so until the Spanish-American war in 1898 when the island was taken by America as well as the Philippine Islands.  The first recorded communications history for Guam was a complaint in 1684 from a missionary who complained about the late arrival of mail from Manila in the Philippines. Mail was carried by supply ships as both locations were ruled by the Spaniards.

The first recorded communication with the outside world was the laying of a submarine telegraph cable in March 1903 from Hawaii via Wake and Midway Islands financed by an American silver magnate John W Mackay A cable had been d been laid 3 months earlier from the U.S. mainland to Hawaii. Another cable was laid from Guam to Japan via the Bonin Islands, plus one to Yap, which also had a cable to Shanghai China. Thus Guam thus became an important hub for world telegraph traffic in the Pacific Ocean region; this continued until the Japanese invasion in 1941. The occupation of the island by Japan on 8^th December 1941 saw the cables interrupted and the cables were not restored until July 1945 after the island’s re-capture by US forces. In 1951 the cable was broken but was not restored due to age and costs. The first radio contact from Guam to the US was made by “Ham Radio” operators in May 1936In September 1945, RCA Communications, with the help of the US Navy established radio – telegraph circuits to San Francisco and radio telephone service was provided in November in the same year. RCA also provided H.F Radio communications to Saipan, the Philippines as well as to the USA.  The US Navy built an “on island”  telephone system after WW 2 which included non-military as well as the military bases and this included the laying and maintainence of the telephone cable system. The switching system utilised was ‘step by step’ Strowger and this continued until the mid 1970.s when the Government of Guam established the “Guam telephone Authority”. They took over all the domestic sections of the system including billing and their inter-connection with overseas destinations which was via an RCA semi-automatic switchboard in the capital Agana. RCA also also provided the operators for the manual International Telephone service. In 1969 it opened a satellite earth station to supplement the international network access. RCA transferred, in the early seventies, a semi-automatic telephone interface from Anchorage, Alaska which was installed to cope with the increase in traffic generated by the establishment of  Japanese 5 star hotels and an large increase in tourists. This was replaced by an NEC digital exchange in 1976. Guam was given the International telephone Code number of 675.In April 1964 the first Transpacific Cable (TPC 1) was laid, a joint venture by RCA, AT&T Long Lines and Hawaii Telco. It had 126 2-way voice circuits and was extended to Tokyo, Japan in in June 1964. On the 15th January 1965 the cable was extended to Manila. Further cables were also laid (TPC 2 which had 845 circuits) in 1975. Two further cables TPC3 with 3780 circuits laid in 1988 and TPC 4 in 1991. All these cables were operated by AT&T Long Lines with an underground station built to resist an atomic bomb blast? AT&T now occupy OTC’s former Seacom station building but not the six houses which are owned by the US military.The Guam Telex service was also provided by RCA, utilising a Siemens Exchange. RCA, IT&T and WUI also provided leased telegraph services to subscribers on the island and overseas.

OTC’s Guam involvement, on behalf of the Commonwealth (Canada Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore) was to obtain a license from the U.S. government to establish and operate the SEACOM Cable station located in Tamuning with an inter-connection to the Transpacific cable station This had provision, on a co-axial cable for 120 circuits but was only fitted for 84 (7 groups of 12 Channels of 4 Khz bandwith.).The 120 channel System was replaced in 1976 with a larger transmission system using the same co-axial cable. The Seacom Cable system was opened by Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth on March 30^th 1967. The SEACOM Cable between Singapore and Guam had only 80 channels similar to the Compac Cable (but manufactured by ATE from UK) across the Pacific, whilst the Guam to Cairns section via Madang, New Guinea had 160 channels. With transmission equipment and Submarine repeaters manufactured by STC (UK) and the power equipment on Guam– Cairns System was all made in Australia who also provided the raw materials for the cable construction. This larger size was provided on O.T.C.’s insistence, as they saw the growth in traffic. In 1976 OTC installed a Time Assignment Speech Interpolation System (TASI A) which was transferred from MontrealCanada to increase its capacity between Sydney and Guam as well as upgrading the 120 channel system. OTC’s other involvement was a contract with Western Union International (WUI) to provide telex and telephone circuits for the US Defence Communication agency (DEFCOM) to overseas locations from Guam . These were required to be equalised to 1/3 normal international standards as they were used for cryptic purposes.This was terminated in October 1976 as WUI appointed their own representative to the island and established an office.

Pennant Hills Transmitting Site: Then and Now!

Our Thanks to Neil Yakalis, for this item from Transit and his Photo.

The 400 four mast at Pennant Hills as passers-by knew it for the last 50 years.

As the last guy-wire burnt through in the flame of an oxy-acetylene torch and 400 feet of mast keeled over slowly at first,  until in a cloud of dust, it crashed to the ground. The handful of spectators at Pennant Hills on the morning of Friday 17th April 1959, saw the final stage in the passing of at Coastal Radio Station which had served Australia well for close on half a century.

Construction of Pennant Hills Radio Station commenced fifty years ago, early in 1909; the  contractors being the German Telefunken Company. Equipment installed by that company for the Australian Post Ofiice was a 30 Kw quenched gap spark transmitter for 500 Kc/s, and a 60 Kilowat long-wave arc transmitter.

The station commenced operating in 1910.

During World War 1 the station, in common with the remainder of the Coastal Radio Service, was taken over by the Department of the Navy  and was handed back to the Post Office in 1918.

In 1922, Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Limited was given the responsibility for the operation of the Coastal Radio Service and this control was maintained until1946 when the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (Australia) was formed to take over both the Coastal Radio Service and Australian overseas cable and radio services.

The Pennant Hills station served as a combined sending and receiving Coastal Radio Station until 1926 when, due to services on high frequencies to ships, the receiving facilities were transferred to a site at Willoughby. On the 28th February. 1927, the permanent Coastal Radio receiving station at La Perouse was completed and thereafter Pennant Hills served purely as a transmitting station providing facilities for coastal and overseas services on both telephone and telegraph. With the further development of Australia’s overseas services it became obvious shortly after World War 2 that the Pennant Hills site, with its restricted area, could no longer provide the necessary requirements and, in 1950, O.T.C. acquired a site of some 700 acres at Doonsidc on the Western Highway for the construction of a transmitting centre.

During the years 1955/ 1956, with the completion of the new station at Doonside, both the coastal radio and overseas transmitting facilities were transferred from Pennant Hills to Doonside after which the original Pennant Hills station was maintained for some little time as a purely emergency centre until with the completion of adequate facilities at Doonside the station was finally abandoned.

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If any of our readers who served at Pennant Hills have photographs or anecdotes of the station in its earlier days. We should be very glad to hear from  them.

Compac Cable Installation  Memories By Henry Cranfield

The   installation of the Compac cable saw the construction of the Terminal Building in Paddington and the opening of the first stage to New Zealand in mid 1963 with the final opening by Queen Elizabeth in December 1963. The commissioning of the Paddington equipment was under Bob Long AGM (Technical) and as the UK end was 10 hours different in time; for us occurred in the evening hours.

Bob would turn up after normal working hours in Head Office and put on a head and breast set and walk around the ITMC checking this and that. The head-set had an extra long cord made by Kerry Kearney who would walk behind Bob transferring the plug of the headset where required.  “Bravehearts” would sneak up and partially unplug same and Bob would then upbraid Kerry for not keeping up? Our Bob was not noted for his humour?

John Hampton was one of the engineers involved and liked his cup of coffee. So he bought a jar of Nescafe which we shared . Foolishly he left same in the ITMC kitchen cupboard to discover it had emptied over-night, so we bought a second jar with the same result. On the third night; I cut some Masonite strips up into pencil size and put same through the pencil sharpener. Then I put a layer of paper into the jar covered by a mixture of coffee and shavings! “Voila” as they say in France, problem solved but no one owned up as to who took same?

When commissioning the ISTC equipment, the FM Telegraph Systems we were delayed as the equipment was sent on to Suva and had to be returned to Sydney by air-cargo.

On the Sunday before the Tuesday opening we were still commissioning telex circuits.

I was on the order-wire to Canada doing the line-ups when a stout, red – headed gentleman came and asked me who I was talking to? I did not know him but he had on a canvas beach hat, Hawaiian Shirt, shorts and sandals so I gave him my head-set and he talked to Canada for some 20 to 30 minutes and then let me continue my testing. He then kept coming back every 5 minutes or so asking questions as to where this is or was not which wasted my time. So I finally said “If you would only go away and take all those head office people with you we will finish on Monday as planned. If not we will be here until next Sunday!!” He pulled his hat down over his ears, took all the head office people with him and they left. Several minutes later Ralph Brown came to me and said “Have you seen Edgar Appleton?” “NO” I said “What does he look like as I have never met him”. “He is the Director Operations” Ralph said all astonished. “Well! He has gone” I said and no more was said or mentioned later.

Roll on 3 years to August 1966 and in the middle of the Seacom Installation in Madang we were visited by Frank Stanton, the AGM, and Edgar, Director Operations, who were visiting the PNG stations.  They arrived in Madang at 4.30PM looking very shattered as they were on the “Mail run” a DC3 aircraft with 4 rows of 3 seats (Canvas like deck chairs with pipe frame and seat belt) at the rear and  with mail bags and cargo in the front of same, no meals or drinks and a “Dunny Can” in a compartment behind the seats. They had nothing to eat or drink since 7.30 AM breakfast. So I took them home where Barbara had sandwiches and a fruit cake.

Next morning when we got to the station they had morning tea with the install staff and gave a short resume as to OTC’s future.

Then Edgar said he would get Barry Thompson to show him around as Frank wanted to talk to me about local political situation.

When we got into the office Frank said “Edgar is scared of you”. “Why I asked” and he had never been to any station where an installation was in progress nor unless   he had been invited.

When Edgar joined us I apologized, but he told me to forget it and congratulated us on the job we were doing. The past catches up at times??

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From your Editor. As a former editor, I am well aware of the need for contributions from our membership. The complaints I have heard about the Newsletter covering too much technical content perhaps is an indication of where the input comes from.. So! May I ask the ex CRS, Marketing and Administration people for some input to balance the content? We can edit the item to fit, so please don’t be shy and put your fingers to the Keys or Pen to paper?? This marks the beginning of OTVA’s New Year so let us all begin by PARTICIPATING in your organisation’s activities and so ensure its ongoing success!

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Some thoughts and Anecdotes on Installations. By John Toland.

When I think back to the many courses that I have done during my years in communications I

never realised how little information was passed on about Atomic Structure until I read a book recently titled “The Outline of Wireless” printed in 1933. At that time I considered not much was known on that subject, but I was to find I was wrong. It went on to say as you probably know that both Electrons and Protons revolve around the Nucleus of the Atom.

The diameter of the Electron is 3/20.000.000.000.000 of an inch. (that is 25.4mm to those metricated )

The diameter of the Proton is 1/25.000.000.000.000 of an inch.

Small as the Electron is, it is capable under certain circumstances of attaining a speed of 540.000.000 miles per hour (You can convert that if you like).

The Proton is much heavier than the Electron. The weight of an Atom is practically the weight of the Protons contained therein. As a matter of fact if we had a cricket ball made up of closely packed Protons it would weigh a trifling 12.000.000 Tons( Close enough to Tonnes}.

While the diameter of an average Molecule is 1/25.000.000 of an inch, the diameter of an Atom of the gas helium for example is 1/400.000.000 of an inch. Langmuir (Whoever he was) calculated and that was without a computer) that if each Molecule contained in a cubic inch was converted to a grain of the finest sea–sand there would be enough to fill a trench one mile wide by three feet deep stretching from New York to San Francisco. Can you imagine how many Molecules there are in a cubic inch? In a small pins head, there are twenty million, million Molecules.

I realise that some of you may doubt all of this, but you are quite at liberty to carry out experiments to prove otherwise.

Anzcan Installation on Norfolk Island

Part of Norfolk’s history is about a convict named Barney Duffy who escaped and lived in a hole under a pine tree for seven years before being recaptured they even have a song about him.

On the day of the opening of the Station which was to be by the Minister of Communications named Michael Duffy, a Brass Plaque was mounted on the front of the building and had a small curtain across it, to be opened by him. I checked it before the Ceremony and pasted over the name of Michael was the name Barney. That’s Norfolk Island humour or was it one of our lads. I think I know who it was.

We had some wonderful times on Norfolk with the entertainment , eating out and the innumerable BBQs around the cliff tops. One evening BBQ we had was attended by Bob Waterfall and he stepped backwards to get a better picture on his camera and stepped over the cliff falling down a couple of feet and landing on a ledge where one of our lads grabbed him and pulled him back. Next day he went back and looked at the hundred foot drop that he just missed out on. We were there for the yearly celebration called “Bounty Day” where the Islanders march from the Kingston area to the Cemetery to pay their respects and then back to the grounds of the gaol for a big picnic. I arranged for Tee Shirts for our group depicting a large emblem of “Anzcan” on the front.

The cows on Norfolk have the right of way anywhere and they are made up of different groups that have their own areas. The mob near our house was called the “Grassy Road Mob”. The cows wander through the middle of the shopping centre of Burnt Pine and stick their noses into the shop doors.

The wife of one of our boys hit a cow one night and went back the next day to find it, but it was gone. They say the rule on the island was if you kill a cow, say nothing, just dig a hole and bury it.

I can think of many more things that we did, such as the “Champagne Breakfasts” at the beach, The “Fish Fries” at the Golf Club, our Scuba Diving and the Crayfish and Balmain Bugs that we caught and cooked afterwards, attending the Big Race Day, and many more, but it was the best installation that I had been involved in, but it sure leaves a lot of memories.

Doonside Transmitting Station..

Reading Dennis Grant’s story of the 10 Kw Transmitter at Doonside jogged my memory. Those transmitters were built by OTC at their workshops at Pennant Hills and were installed in the new building floor so they had to add another 2 inches of concrete on top. Don’t I know it?

I was in charge, later of an Installation Team to install 2 STC CY10 10 Kw Transmitters in the far end of the annex and we had to cut many holes through the floor for the fan ducts and various other cables. We had only a Kanga Hammer of some sort and an Electric Drill. This was taking us quite some time and one day, we had a visit from a engineer asking why we were taking so long.

One of them said you are doing it the wrong way, you should have water in the hole. He gave us a demonstration with the Electric Drill and ended up showering his trousers with cemented water. Good! “Carry on, your doing fine” he said and left. We eventually finished the holes and installed the transmitters.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             But when it came to testing them, one of them had a parasitic or something and when tuned to a particular frequency the PA area lit up like lightning. The Doonside boys had never seen anything like it and an STC Engineer had not either. The answer was not to use it on that frequency. Years later I was removing then, to install them at Norfolk Island and found that the large Coaxial Cable, made up of a heavy copper busbar had a right angle bend in it. One side of the bend had never been screwed, so I suspect that was the trouble.I led a team to install them later on Norfolk Island but didn’t make the same mistake

Later when extra transmitters were installed in the annex at Doonside they employed a contractor to drill the required holes and then they had to support the floor with a steel structure as the floor had cracked.

“ Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be”  William Hazlitt

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 Kept busy by CRICKET

When Bradman stole a quick single at Lords he set not only some English fieldsmen into feverish activity, but also an incalculable number of people concerned with communicating the event to those interested. Radio commentators talked fast, press typewriters chattered, press cameras clicked-and there was more work for O.T.C.

The Commission’s receiving station at La Perouse co-operated with P.M.G. stations in the reception of B.B.C. broadcasts. When the broadcasts faded, the Melbourne operating room was the focal point for cryptic messages on which Australian “synthetic” broadcasts were based-and at all times the focal point of endless “Urgent Press.” The picturegram studio in Melbourne and the terminal set up in Sydney for the occasion averaged a dozen pictures per night. To ensure the best possible reception of the direct broadcast, the pick-ups of various stations, including La Perouse, were fed to the G.P.O., Sydney, where the best was selected and supplied to Australian broadcasting stations. La Perouse’s continuous contribution to this “pool” kept Messrs. Heavey, Peell, Bailey, Drew and Stanfield very busy throughout the Tests. Preoccupied with Australia’s listening comfort, they themselves took in little of broadcasts -not even the scores, to the chagrin of their colleagues. The consistency of the direct broadcast exceeded expectations, so that the synthetic broadcasts were required infrequently. The technique arranged by the A.B.C. in conjunction with OTC was as follows: At the beginning of play an A.B.C. representative would commence a series of messages providing in condensed form a ball by ball description until he received the word “uncable” flashed from Australia, and indicating that the direct broadcast was being received. Whenever the broadcast showed signs of deteriorating the word “recable” was flashed to the ground and the messages resumed until once again the message “uncable” was received. The smoothness with which the synthetic broadcasts took over and handed back the description was a tribute to the thorough organisation and quick handling of traffic. To the Melbourne C.O.R., the Supervisor, Mr. Mancer, introduced production-line flow, from reperforating, printing, gumming to P.M.G. telegraphist, the latter keying the messages to the G.P.O’s. in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, whence they were phoned to local broadcasting stations by teams of telephonists. Many messages were in the telephonists’ hands throughout Australia within two minutes of their being lodged with Cable and Wireless Limited at the cricket ground. The A.B.C. representative sent 11,000 words during the five Tests, which, with nearly 17,000 words of urgent press matter to add also to normal traffic, was sufficient to keep Mr. Mancer and company quite busy (see column 4). Meanwhile, upstairs, Mr. Chilton and his team – Messrs. J. Chalkley, A. Houseman, P. Barrow, G. Scott and W. Terrillwere receiving pictures. They were controlling the reception not only for themselves, but also for the improvised Sydney terminal where Messrs. W. ]envey, G. Russell (from Melbourne), H. Burgess and G. Flynn were intercepting the London transmission via La Perouse, and also by relay from Melbourne. The consistently high standard of the many pictures received during the considerable period of the five Tests and the Olympic Games when these two staff teams worked under abnormally demanding conditions represents a really remarkable performance. The Melbourne team received altogether 285 Test Cricket pictures and 160 Olympic Games pictures. The Sydney team, in action for the night sessions only and concerned primarily with Sydney press requirements, received 174 of these Test pictures and 130 of the Olympic Games.

——————————————————John Hodgson Remembers?

FUN WHILE GUNNERY TRAINING

The following is a story about my Second World War gunnery training which would finally qualify me as a Wireless Air Gunner. The training was carried out in Fairy Battle aircraft at Port Pirie in South Australia. It was the last training flight before qualifying. There were two other trainees in the aircraft and we each had two 100 round circular magazines for firing from Vickers Gas Operated machine guns. The target was a drogue towed by another aircraft. Including the pilot, we were all about 18 or 19 years of age.  As it was our last training flight we asked the pilot if he would put on a turn of aerobatics when we finished our firing exercise.  The pilot gave his agreement and so, with the drogue about 100 feet away, I started firing with one long burst which got rid of the first magazine. (I was first on the gun). Another long burst got rid of the second magazine, The second gunner then started to do likewise, but the poor old machine gun decided to give up the ghost. We then gave the pilot the thumbs up and he immediately went into aerobatics. We three trainees stood in the open rear end of the long cockpit while the pilot put the plane into various aerobatics. Our parachutes were left lying on the floor and the safety cord which we were supposed to attach around our waists was also left on the floor. However, this was great fun. but it almost came to a conclusion for the three of us when the pilot put the aircraft into a partial reverse loop. This caused us to suddenly become weightless and in unison we all started to leave the aircraft with the prospect of a long three or four thousand feet fall into Spencer Gulf. However, our weight was suddenly restored and we all flopped back into the open rear cockpit.

Aerobatics continued and soon we reduced altitude to be flying with just a few feet between the aircraft and water of Spencer Gulf. The Gulf was calm with only small waves, which was fortunate because the pilot started to play silly goats by dipping each wing in turn until the wingtips caused disturbances in the water. As I said, we were all about nineteen years of age and at that age, like young car hoons of today, we thought ourselves indestructible and in this case, luckily, we were not destructed. ..

STORIES FROM BEHIND THE STEERING WHEEL

During the early years of the Second World War I was seventeen years of age and living in Goulburn. I was employed by a motor repair shop which also ran the town’s buses and several taxis. I wanted to be licensed to drive both buses and taxis, so I fronted up at the Council Chambers and told the clerk behind the desk what I wanted. On request I produced my driver’s license which satisfied him of my qualifications, so he gave me a bus and taxi drivers licence on the spot.

It was a bit difficult driving the taxi at night because the town (city) was on blackout conditions. One night I picked up a woman passenger who hopped into the front seat beside me and immediately started on suggestive moves. (She was probably hoping for a free trip). However, during the trip a light fell on my face and she exclaimed, “Why, you’re only a baby.” So that was the end of her manoeuvres. She was about thirty years of age and I believe she was one of the town’s prostitutes. Instead of being on the receiving end she had to pay up.  I will also mention that in Goulburn and during those years it was very easy to get a driver’s licence. On turning seventeen I drove my Father’s car without a licensed driver beside me to the Police Station where I stated my request for licence. The policeman said “Ok let’s go for run.” I drove off and at the next turn he said “Turn left”. The same applied at the next three corners which took us back to the front of the police station. Test over and licence issued.

———————————————

Follow not the well-worn path, but go instead and make your own so that others may follow?” George Bernard Shaw-

 

 

 

 

 OTVA Newsletter June 2013

 2013 NSW AGM

Date: Friday 14 June at 11.30

Venue: Level 2

NSW Bowlers’ Club

99 York St, Sydney

RSVP: president@otva.com

By 7 th June 2013

call/SMS 0411 260 542

Interstate Vets are welcome to attend.

 

PRESIDENTS MESSAGE.

Fellow Members of the OTVA,

I hope that this newsletter finds you and your families in good health and enjoying all that life has to offer.

Well another 12 months has passed since last year’s AGM. The 2013 AGM will be held on June 14 at the Bowlers Club in York Street Sydney. We are looking for a new editor for the OTVA Newsletter as Bob Emanuel who has been performing that role over the past few years who has asked to be replaced so that he can focus on other activities that require his time and attention. If you would like to volunteer to perform this role please email me at president@otva.com to register your interest.

It is a very rewarding job especially as you get to see first-hand many wonderful stories about the people that made OTC a great place in which to work as well as details of things that happened during the OTC era. Unfortunately not all of these stories can be printed for legal, moral and ethical reasons.

The web site https://www.otva.com/blog/) contains a list of all financial members of the OTVA and an email containing the same list has been circulated to all of the email addresses that your committee has on file. If you did not receive an email please email president@otva.com so that your email address can be added to the email distribution list. Your email address will be kept private unless you specifically ask for it to be shared with others.

The OTVA web page (http://www.otva.com) and the BLOGs (https://www.otva.com/blog/) continue to be a great source of enjoyment for our members. The number of hits each month is consistently high and your committee continues to receive correspondence from ex-OTC personnel, their families and members of the public asking questions about many aspects of OTC. Many of these emails are from overseas from ex-OTC personnel living abroad or persons interested in the history of OTC.

Email continues to be a great source of communication with you our members. If you send an email to president@otva.com I will review it and where appropriate email it out to those on the email distribution list as well as upload it to the BLOG site where deemed appropriate.

Regrettably the project to digitise Transit and Contact magazines is not yet complete. Copies of the missing magazines continue to trickle in requiring us to delay the final release of a DVD to get a more complete compilation of magazines. Your committee intends to make the DVD available to financial members of the OTVA upon request.

I extend my sincere condolences to the families of our ex-OTC brothers and/or their partners who have departed this life since I last addressed you. We are saddened by their passing but are gladdened by the fullness of their rich and long lives. May They Rest In Peace

Warmest regards,

Peter Bull

0411 260542

peterbull@otva.com

________________________

 

COMPAC 50TH ANNIVERSARY

The 50th Anniversary of the opening of traffic on the COMPAC Cable is in 2013 and you are invited to join in.

A subcommittee has been established. If you wish to contribute, contact Peter Bull, president@otva.com

________________________

Carnarvon SES – a brief history of the early days

By

Jim Harte

The “raison d’être” for the OTCA Carnarvon satellite station was to provide a reliable communications link between the NASA/AWA tracking station located on the southern end of Brown’s Range at Carnarvon, and NASA control in the USA. In 1966 the tracking station was relying of Telecom landlines routed via a Meekatharra bearer system, and a back-up troposcatter (Troposphere scattering propagation – Ed) system to Geraldton.

When commissioned (early 1967), Carnarvon provided 7 AVD circuits to the US via the Comsat Brewster Flat earth station. Although Carnarvon had additional capacity, the number of circuits leased by NASA remained virtually static up until the tracking stations closure in the mid 70s following rationalisation of their deep-space support network. Even with the commissioning of the CVN 2 antenna (Mitsubishi 97ft antenna) in 1970, the number of active comms channels did not significantly expand, apart from a brief period where the station provided some temporary Perth –Sydney capacity while Telecom carried out upgrade work on the East-West microwave system (late 1970?), and in the late 70’s where CVN 2 was used to uplink the WA Remote Area Television (RATV) signal as part of the Government’s Homestead and Community Broadcast Satellite Service (HACBSS) initiative (the forerunner of the AUSSAT service).

The early station build was carried out by the Geraldton Building Company, who provided the station buildings and infrastructure (communications – comms – building, power house and plant workshop), road works, the initial 12 staff houses, and the antenna foundation works.

The satellite earth station equipment, one of five similar earth stations, the others being Andover, Brewster Flat, Paumalu and Philippines, was provided by Page Engineering (a subsidiary of Northrop?) as part of a turn-key installation, with the newly trained OTC staff providing the technical labour support to Page.

At the time the OTC technicians arrived on site for their OJT (on-the- job-training), the concrete antenna podium had just been completed, and the antenna components were being un-crated in preparation for assembly. Everything including our accommodation was essentially still WIP. Our first job was to lay the station earth mat, which involved several days at the bottom of some very sandy trenches (the whole site was built on one large stabilised sand dune – Brown’s Range), hammering in numerous earth stakes, then connecting them up to form the earth mat. This was carried out while waiting for the three trailers of electronic equipment to arrive on site from Perth. A good shower and a few beers were required each day to wash down the red dust.

Our accommodation at this time was the three of four houses that had been completed – three to four techs to a house, fending for ourselves, which was not too easy as we (about 8 of us) only had use of a couple of Commonwealth cars pending arrival of our own vehicles. A couple of days after the delayed arrival our cars (the transporter was forced to drive across the Nullarbor as an earlier one had lost some off its load off the high-speed freight train as the cars had not been tied down, resulting in an embargo on car transporters) we had an un-seasonal downpour and most of them were bogged outside the houses in the clay road-base mix used for the station road works – there was nothing else available in the area.

With the arrival of the 3 van/trailers on site (40ft comms and maintenance vans, and 20ft power van), and the other electronic equipment boxes/containers), our technical work commenced. As the equipment had already been integrated in the US, it was essentially matter of racking all the equipment in the comms van, then running all the interconnecting cables (mostly pre-cut to length in the US) between the vans, and the antenna mounted equipment (up and down converters, HPAs, LNAs and tracking equipment.

Unfortunately for some who were not too comfortable with working at heights, the cable running on the antenna required cable brackets to be drilled into the antenna yoke structure necessitating a couple of lucky fellows to spend much time hanging from a wooden scaffold/platform drilling and tapping holes for the brackets up to 15m above ground. The other poor sods had to put up with working in the air-conditioned vans, and coming out into the heat periodically.

At this early stage in the life of the station, apart from having to acclimatise to the heat and the dust, we had to put up with the continuous scream of the 150KVA GMC 2 stroke diesel engine that provided the source of 60Hz power to the US supplied equipment until the town mains driven permanent 50/60Hz motor converter set was delivered from England and commissioned as part of the station power work. The GM diesel remained on site in the van as the 60Hz back-up supply till station closure.

The on-site OTC project engineers were Gus Berzins (since returned to Riga, Latvia – see next item), and had Don Kennedy as his junior engineer. As this was OTC’s first satellite station there was quite a stream of Engineering and Ops visitors during the installation and commissioning phase.

(Jim Harte, if you didn’t know, was Dux of the Year twice at the DCA Technicians Training School and was also the most outstanding Technician-in Training for that year. Jim won the bits and pieces to build a stereo amplifier – do you still have it, Jim? Dennis Grant was co-runner up and was awarded a subscription to Radiotronics, the AWA valve design magazine – Ed)

________________________

Letter To The President

Dear Peter,

Not sure if we have ever met, but I am Guntis (“Gus”) Berzins and from 1960 to 1980 I was an engineer in OTC(A).

In late 1966 and early 1967 I was responsible for acceptance testing of the initial Carnarvon Earth Station, as well as being involved with the Carnarvon – Goonhilly TV transmission, which took place at the time and which was the first real time TV exchange between Australia and an overseas country. Late last year I saw in Engineers Australia that a Space Museum had been established in the earth station in Carnarvon and this stimulated me to write down my recollections of this time, as well as to collect all the photographs which I still had.

My intention was to submit all this material to the Space Museum, and I would also be glad to contribute it to the OTC Veterans Association web site. However, before signing off on it I wanted to see what else had been written about this period, so I could cross-check some of the facts, and I therefore wanted to ask if I could be given access to the restricted part of the OTCVA web site.

If necessary, I would be glad to pay the $10 and join OTCVA, recognising however that geography would probably preclude me from attending any functions in person. After leaving OTC(A) I worked for 13 years in London with Inmarsat but in 1993 returned to my original homeland Latvia, where I now live in Riga.

I still retain many fond memories of my years with OTC(A), it was a fine organisation and a great bunch of people.

With best regards,

Guntis (“Gus”) Berzins

________________________

Historical Submarine Cable Remnants Glimpsed Near Fremantle.

Along the rocky foreshore at Cottesloe just north of Leighton Beach are some corroded artefacts which in their time were highly significant for Australia’s external business and defence communications. They are the remains of submarine cables which traversed some 1721 nautical miles between Cottesloe to a relay station at Direction Island, one of the Cocos group in the north eastern Indian Ocean, and thence to other parts of the British Empire. The first cable to Cottesloe was activated in 1901, the year of Australian federation. It was owned by the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company (EEAC). In WW1 the cable’s strategic significance was immediately recognised by the Germans. A raiding party from the warship SMS Emden tried to close down the Cocos Islands facility in November 1914, but were thwarted when HMAS Sydney which had been escorting the first convoy of Australian and New Zealand troops (ANZACs) to the Middle East, diverted and destroyed their ship. The undersea circuit was extended in 1920 with the laying of a cable 1,525 nautical miles from Cottesloe to Adelaide in South Australia. This was omitted from a map on a cast-bronze commemorative plaque currently on display at the Cottesloe site. In 1926 another cable was laid between Cocos Island and Cottesloe. This coincided with the opening a grand purpose-built relay station overlooking the ocean at the Western Australian end. On the domestic scene, a small cable was laid from Cottesloe to nearby Rottnest Island in 1900. A larger replacement became operational in 1935. The main overseas cables and the Cottesloe relay station ceased operation on 31 July 1966. By then it had become owned by the federal government’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC). The building still stands today, but is known at the McCall Centre. It’s become a state government residential facility for children with severe emotional and behavioural conditions. Last week I noticed the storms had exposed two differing sections of redundant cable I hadn’t seen previously. Because they were slightly south of the main terminal building they may have been related to the Post Master General department’s 1935 Rottnest circuit.

Of particular interest to me was the cleanly cut cross-section. The black rubber component still had some flexibility when squeezed with my thumb. The green verdigris (Copper Chloride as the cable is near the sea – Ed) betrays the presence of the copper conductor. I went back to the area at low tide yesterday with my wife and our 17 year old daughter to take some photos of the remains of another three cables still visible on the shallow but jagged limestone reef further north, directly in front of the old Cable Station.

________________________

NASA SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHES THREE SMARTPHONE SATELLITES

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.

From Gary Hausfeld via Peter Bull

A recent NASA test launch included 3 HTC Nexus One smart phones, with extra batteries and high power radio, which they are calling “Phonesats”.

These phones will take pictures and send these back to earth in bursts of data packets which then need to be stitched back together.

Amateur radio operators around the world are asked to try to receive the data packets and forward them to NASA for processing.

Details on web site:

http://www.phonesat.org/

April 22, 2013 MEDIA RELEASE: 13-32AR NASA SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHES THREE SMARTPHONE SATELLITES MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. — Three smartphones destined to become low-cost satellites rode to space Sunday aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. The trio of “PhoneSats” is operating in orbit, and may prove to be the lowest-cost satellites ever flown in space. The goal of NASA’s PhoneSat mission is to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable, yet very inexpensive, satellite. Transmissions from all three PhoneSats have been received at multiple ground stations on Earth, indicating they are operating normally. The PhoneSat team at NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, Calif., will continue to monitor the satellites in the coming days. The satellites are expected to remain in orbit for as long as two weeks. Satellites consisting mainly of the smartphones will send information about their health via radio back to Earth in an effort to demonstrate they can work as satellites in space. The spacecraft also will attempt to take pictures of Earth using their cameras. Amateur radio operators around the world can participate in the mission by monitoring transmissions and retrieving image data from the three satellites. Large images will be transmitted in small chunks and will be reconstructed through a distributed ground station network. More information can found at:

http://www.phonesat.org

NASA’s off-the-shelf PhoneSats already have many of the systems needed for a satellite, including fast processors, versatile operating systems, multiple miniature sensors, high-resolution cameras, GPS receivers and several radios. NASA engineers kept the total cost of the components for the three prototype satellites in the PhoneSat project between $3,500 and $7,000 by using primarily commercial hardware and keeping the design and mission objectives to a minimum. The hardware for this mission is the Google-HTC Nexus One smartphone running the Android operating system. NASA added items a satellite needs that the smartphones do not have — a larger, external lithium-ion battery bank and a more powerful radio for messages it sends from space. The smartphone’s ability to send and receive calls and text messages has been disabled. Each smartphone is housed in a standard cubesat structure, measuring about 4 inches square. The smartphone acts as the satellite’s onboard computer. Its sensors are used for attitude determination and its camera for Earth observation.

________________________

THE COMMERCIAL BRANCH, INTERPLEX AND OTC’S NEW YORK OFFICE – Part 2.

By

Tom Barker

OTC had become the unwitting victim of the Cable and Wireless MSC (Message Switching Centre) in Hong Kong, a battery of Univac 418 mainframe computers, engineered to handle private telegraph networks, customised to the needs of each individual company. Such systems and services were being offered by many international carriers, at that time, but the C & W MSC had embarked upon a campaign to target Australian telex customers, probably because they knew that OTC did not have this capability. It was apparent that OTC would continue to lose business this way, unless it had a computer-based message switching system to offer its customers, so that a network of private lines, connecting to every major office of any corporation around the world, could communicate, via the Sydney-based switch. This entailed selling the service, not just to our Australian customers, but to the corporation’s (usually multi-national) whose headquarters could be based anywhere in the world.

After OTC management were made aware of the competitive disadvantage that OTC was suffering, in this situation, it was decided to install a message switching centre for private line networks and it was to be called Interplex. At first the Interplex system comprised a number of small, stand-alone computer systems, allocated on a one-per-customer basis, but this arrangement proved too inflexible to meet all our customer needs, so an arrangement of General Automation (GA16/64) mini-computers, called “Mini-Plus” systems, was installed at Paddington, and these were capable of meeting a much wider range of customer requirements.

From that time on, the competition between OTC’s Interplex service and the C & W MSC was very keen. We won some very good accounts and we lost some important ones to our competitors. It was an area of OTC’s business which was truly engaged in competition for business with an aggressive alternative supplier, an unfamiliar scenario for many who had spent their entire careers employed in monopoly carrier situations.

One of the facts which became apparent to those of us engaged in this business, was that 45% of OTC’s corporate business was with companies based in the USA. We began to participate in International Telecom Expos, (such as the ICA) in the U.S and we soon realised that OTC needed to have a permanent presence in the U.S. if we were to succeed in this area of business. At that time, OTC management was not enthusiastic about having a representative office in another country, to talk to customers, because there was a mindset that OTC was a monopoly and didn’t need to compete for business. Fortunately this did not apply to people like George Maltby, who took the proposal to establish an office in New York, to the board a number of times, before finally gaining approval, in 1984.

The proviso which we were obliged to work with, was that no capital expenditure could be made, so everything had to be leased (presumably so we would not have to write anything off if the venture failed). I walked the streets of New York, trying to find somewhere to hang up OTC’s shingle, and finally took a space in a serviced office business, located in Fifth Avenue, near the Rockefeller Centre. I was assisted in the task of setting up this office by some good friends in British Telecom International, who were setting up their own New York office at that time, a much more elaborate, permanent and impressive affair than OTC’s modest presence.

This being OTC’s first overseas-based office, a number of things had to be considered which were unprecedented in its experience. One important detail was the selection of staff and the length of their terms in that post. I decided that three years was probably the most sensible term length, as it takes some time to become accustomed to working in a foreign country and also time to prepare for ones return home, so three years would allow a useful time in the job, once settled in. Trevor Duff was selected to fill the Manager position and Ravi Bahtia his assistant.

For our official opening, George Maltby prevailed upon an old friend, the Australian Ambassador to the United States, Sir Robert Cotton, KCMG, to officiate, and George selected the Waldorf Astoria as the venue. Our OTC PR section arranged for a New York firm to set up the location (the Ballroom) and the catering for the event. Inviting Sir Robert to officiate was a masterstroke. Although Americans are proud not to be part of the British Empire (or what’s left of it) they salivate at the presence of Royalty or British Nobles. Their responses to our invitations were overwhelming. On the night of the event we were blown away by the number of industry leaders who attended. It was a stunning success. For me, the two biggest thrills were when I talked for some time to Warren Buffet (about his buying Western Union Telegraph) and when Mike Ford, the head of British Telecom International, said to me (very quietly) “You beat us, Tom”. They had held their New York Office official opening a week before us and we both knew that what Mike said was true.

The opening of the New York office not only gave OTC a permanent presence in the USA, which was appreciated immediately by our many corporate customers and US correspondent carriers. It made possible the scheduling of regular visits to them and also set the stage for the opening of OTC representative offices in London and Wellington shortly afterwards, which were to be followed by others in Japan and Vietnam, etc, in the years that followed.

The serviced office facility which we leased in Fifth Avenue served as OTC’s office for nearly two years, by which time any doubts about the success of the project were long gone and Trevor Duff was able to move to a much nicer and better equipped facility in the main street of White Plains, outside Manhattan, but located very conveniently to many of our customers and US correspondent carriers and much cheaper than a downtown Manhattan location.

As fate later destined (unexpectedly), I was to spend the last two years of my OTC career in that office and I was able to observe, first hand, the advantages of being in a position to deal with issues which were important to OTC’s business, in the same time-frame as those people with whom we were dealing.

Sadly, a number of OTC’s corporate customers were located in the World Trade Centre twin towers and we would spend many days in meetings there, with those people, so it was horrifying to witness the destruction of those towers, on television, from my home in Australia, many years later and to hear the stories of friends who lost members of their families in that tragedy.

________________________

Practical Jokes in the MRSC

By

Bob Emanuel

I was reminded recently in an email from Jeff Bultitude and Ian Warby of an innocent April Fool’s Day prank in the Message Relay Switching Centre (MRSC) at Paddington that had the funniest outcome.

It involved the UNIVAC Fastrand drums used to store the International telegrams to and from Australia in the era when telegrams were king.

There was no telephone IDD then and the telex exchanges were about to take over from telegrams as the main means of international business communication.

These amazing devices consisted of two large drums of metal weighing 2.25 tons, one above the other, with a magnetic surface that could have data – telegrams – written on it and then read back for sending overseas or back to the PMG. They were massive devices; no-one who worked at the MRSC can forget these magnificent units. Visitors were quite impressed, particularly the non-technical.

One was called Drum A and the other was Drum B.

It was 2350GMT – 09:50 AEST – and it was a quite April Fool’s Day in 1975. I wrote a log entry that said that Drum A had jumped out of its bearings, smashed the unit’s walls and gone through the wall of the top floor of Paddington building, falling down into the square bounded by Isenberg’s and crushing cars and people as it rolled down Oxford St.

At 0001GMT – 10:01 AEST – the log entry was “Drum A returned to service”.

The other staff thought it mildly amusing and we went on with the day.

The following morning, a few of us were in Keith McCredden’s office when an urgent call came in from an Engineer in H.O. in a very distressed voice asking why hadn’t he been told about this at the time!

Well, Keith with a huge grin, held his hand over the microphone, told us who it was and what it was about, trying so hard not to laugh.

Allan Mason, Jake Kouciba and I all spilled out into the equipment room, piddling ourselves laughing, trying to hear the one-sided conversation as Keith, showing amazing self-control in not braking up in laughter, patiently explained it was an April Fool’s Day joke, and if the Engineer had read the following log entry he would have seen the entry for what it was, an April Fool’s Day prank.

Keith then joined us in the equipment room and laughed his heart out. It was great to be alive that morning in the MRSC.

I was asked not to do it again. I couldn’t top this effort, so I didn’t.

As George Maltby and Maurie O’Connor said at one reunion, the best stories can’t be written down. There are more MRSC stories I can tell, but only after a few beers at a reunion…

________________________

 

POSITION VACANT – OTVA NEWSLETTER EDITOR

This is my last edition as the editor of the OTVA Newsletter. Increasing demands of my time in Blackheath means that I must pass a few things on. The OTVA Newsletter is one. To edit the Newsletter you need patience and the ability to edit copy sent in by members, often with outrageous formatting that you will need to format into the style of your Newsletter.

You will need to select your own Style.

You will need to browbeat, bully, and otherwise persuade Vets that they do have interesting stories to tell and that you can clean up their writing – I have certainly done that on many occasions whilst keeping the style of the story teller intact – that is most important. You aren’t telling the story, someone else is doing so. I can certainly continue to help in that regard given sufficient notice.

You will have to source stories from non-technical vets as well as Techs and Engineers. You must do this!

You will need to research and write stories yourself.

I liked the OTC Personality story from Brian Collath last edition and think that should be pursued – but the new editor might not want to do so.

It has been a Real Joy, an Honour and Privilege to have edited the OTVA Newsletter, but the time has come for me to go. It is time for a new editor to impress his or her style on this august journal.

And an August Journal it is – the OTVA Newsletter is circulated to a much wider audience outside OTVA, I have found out, as former colleagues from various telcos around Australia and the AsiaPac region have read it and commented favourably to me directly – but they aren’t Vets!

A pity they will not subscribe as you do.

________________________

THE OVERHEADS

Office Bearers 2012–13

President: Peter Bull, president@otva.com

Phone: 0411 260 542

Secretary: Will Whyte, secretary@otva.com

Treasurer: Vacant, but … treasurer@otva.com

Newsletter Editor: Vacant, but… editor@otva.com

Phone: 0412 062 236 or 02 4787 5558

OTVA Membership Subscription:

$10 p.a. is due in May each year.

Please check your mailer as the indication “5/13” or earlier indicates that your subs are now due.

Mail Address for Subs payments.

PO Box 702 RIVERWOOD NSW 2210

Email to:

president@otva.com or treasurer@otva.com

For online bank deposit details.

 

OTVA Newsletter Mar 2013 Final to view the OTVA Newsletter in colour with pictures

Overseas Telecommunication Veterans Newsletter

Registered   Address: 805/41 Meredith Street BANKSTOWN 2200 ISSN   1322-1906     March 2013.    Volume 14   Page 1

 

2013   NSW AUTUMN  REUNION Date:       Friday      5 th  April   2013 at     12 noon Venue:     Podium, Level 1  NSW     Bowlers’ Club 99 York St, Sydney Essential RSVP for Club table bookings to: president@otva.com or    call/SMS  0411 260 542 Interstate Vets are welcome     to attend.

President’s message

Fellow Members of the OTVA,

I hope that you and your families had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year.

I cannot believe that it is March already. The idiom “How time flies when you are having fun” must be applying here.

The OTVA web page (http://www.otva.com) and the BLOGs (https://www.otva.com/blog/) continue to provide members with information and stories pertaining to OTC work colleagues and their families at work and at play. Based upon the number of hits each month it continues to be a valuable source of communication for our members.

Email continues to be a great source of communication with you our members. If you send an email to president@otva.com I will review it and where appropriate email it out to those on the email distribution list as well as upload it to the BLOG site where deemed appropriate.

Our interim treasurer, Bernie White, and Allan Hennessy have worked well to get the finances in order after the unfortunate resignation of our previous Treasurer, Alex Ebert, who needed to focus more on his family and his business. I extend my sincere thanks to Bernie and Allan for their good work.

The project to digitise Transit and Contact magazines has progressed but is not yet complete. Before the magazines that have been scanned are burned to DVD I seek the support of our members one last time to locate the missing magazines. A list of the missing Transit and Contact magazines will appear on the BLOG very soon.

I appeal to all members to check to see if they have any of the missing magazines in an effort to make the library on the DVD as completes as possible.

I thank the following members for their contributions: Kevin O’Brien, Joe Collister, Jeff Thwaites, Robert Hall, Robin Tuckfield, Charlie Maiden, Noel Sutherland, Ray Pow, Peter Whisson, Neil Yakalis, Brian Collath, Kevan Bourke, Peter Hitchener, Gerry Hausfeld, Gavin Trevitt, Diane Whiting, Garry Dunn, Maree Giddins, Bob Dentskevich and Dimmy Krissa.

It is the intention of your committee to transfer the files to DVD which can then be made available to financial members of the OTVA upon request.  I extend my sincere condolences to the families of our ex-OTC brothers and/or their partners who have departed this life since I last addressed you. We are saddened by their passing but are gladdened by the fullness of their rich and long lives. May They Rest In Peace.

Warmest regards,

Peter Bull

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________________________

COMPAC 50TH ANNIVERSARY

The 50th Anniversary of the opening of traffic on the COMPAC Cable in 2013 and you are invited to join in.

A subcommittee has been established. If you wish to contribute, contact Peter Bull, president@otva.com

Robyn Smith is interested in the Cairns Cable Station and its impact upon the local community in northern Queensland especially to the residents of Cairns.

If you would like to contribute  contact Robyn. PO Box 849 North Cairns 4870 or mobile 0419 743 763

 

THE SECRET SUBMARINE CABLE THAT NEVER EVENTUATED

by Cyril Vahtrick

The 1956 Olympic Games had finished in Melbourne and OTC was still trying to come back to normal, with new equipment such as T.E.D. (Teleprinter Error Detection) and T.O.C. (Teleprinter on Cable) to be brought into service. Christmas was approaching when Chief Engineer Bob Long summoned me into his office with some excitement. He had on the table a pink covered document marked “Secret”. I hadn’t seen an official secret document since my Radar days with the Air Force during WW2 and was intrigued at what this might be about.

The document was quite bulky, but I was told to stay there and read it. What it contained was a comprehensive study and recommendation for a submarine telephone cable to provide a link from Britain to Australia, proposed by a British Commonwealth group called the Cable Network Design Committee (CNDC) based in London.

We had heard sketchy reports about a coaxial submarine cable (TAT), with submerged valve operated repeaters which had been laid across the Atlantic that year, but the idea of having valves (electron tubes) inaccessible at the bottom of the ocean seemed almost like science fiction at the time.

The proposal contained in the report was to lay a coaxial cable, capable of carrying 36 simultaneous telephone circuits from UK via Ascension Island to Cape Town, thence a microwave to Durban and then a smaller capacity 24 circuit cable following the old telegraph cable route across the Indian Ocean to Cocos Island and finally Perth. A later smaller cable across the Tasman to New Zealand was also mentioned, with connection via microwave across Australia.

The real jolt came with the financial analysis. With appropriate conservative design, it was estimated that such a system could be established for no more than 20 million pounds! Considering that we had felt courageous committing to purchase a few new HF transmitters at 10 thousand pounds each, the whole cable project looked an impossible dream to me.

Bob Long, on the other hand, not only saw this as the way to the future but, following the telegraph cable example, he immediately began to envisage a full British Commonwealth “round-the-world “ telephone cable system by also crossing the Pacific and Atlantic.

As a major deviation from the route in the document, we did some great circle calculations and showed that we could save over a thousand nautical miles and a couple of million pounds in the Indian Ocean by following a great circle route from Cape Town to Western Australia via a repeater station on Heard Island rather than going via Cocos.

We had earnest discussions with Phillip Law, of Antarctic fame and he enthusiastically embraced the idea of a joint station on Heard Island. OTC had experience in seconding Radio Officers to the Antarctic, so we felt we could handle the problem of staffing Heard Island.

After due consideration by the Commission, PMG and Treasury, an initial response went back to the CNDC from OTC proposing firstly a broad commitment to a “round-the-world” concept and also the Heard Island alternative. The latter idea was opposed by Britain because of the extreme latitude of Heard Island, even though we showed that Oban in Scotland (where the Atlantic telephone cable had landed) was at a higher latitude.

Following our submission to the CNDC a Commonwealth Telecommunications Conference was arranged to be held in London in 1958. This Conference recommended to participating governments a long term plan providing for the development of a British Commonwealth communications system by incorporation, gradually, of a round-the-world large-capacity cable system.

The release of information on another “secret” cable project under construction across the Atlantic (the CANTAT cable from UK to Canada) led to strong agitation from OTC General Manager Trevor Housley that the next step in the round-the-world system should be across the Pacific, thus joining Australia to Canada, USA and UK/Europe.

With support from our Government, OTC initiated a British Commonwealth Telecommunications conference in Sydney in September/ October 1959. The Conference was opened by Prime Minister Menzies and recommended that a trans-Pacific large-capacity cable be constructed as soon as possible. Trevor Housley was invited by the participating parties to be the first Convenor of a Management Committee for the project.

With experience of the explosive growth of telephone traffic across the Atlantic on the telephone cable and noting that CANTAT was going to be to a new design with capacity for a full supergroup (60 circuits) OTC successfully pressed for the same design across the Pacific. (In the event, by reducing the bandwidth of each voice circuit from 4 kHz to 3 kHz, this capacity was increased to 80 circuits). It was agreed that the cable would be named COMPAC.

It is interesting to note in retrospect that, although the transistor had made its first appearance about 1949, ten years later it was still considered that there was not enough experience with transistors to use them in submarine repeaters, despite the substantial advantage in working voltage, size, etc. Therefore the CANTAT and COMPAC repeaters would still be valve operated.

At the end of 1959, I was selected to go to London to join the CNDC, commissioned with the overall design and planning of the COMPAC project. This work proceeded quickly and, in the middle of 1960, the management Committee placed contracts for 8,700 nautical miles of coaxial submarine cable and 335 submerged repeaters, making this the longest telephone cable system yet undertaken in the world.

I had the opportunity to visit the TAT and CANTAT terminals near Oban in Scotland. It was interesting to note that the TAT terminal was buried deep inside a massive cliff face, accessed through a series of bomb-proof doors and no doubt designed to withstand an atom bomb. On the other hand the CANTAT terminal was a conventional building built on a cliff facing the sea, with windows all around, perhaps indicative of a thawing of the cold war.

At home, OTC ran into stiff opposition from the PMG’s Department which saw OTC involvement stopping at the cable landing at Bondi, after which they would take over the terminal equipment. The PMG planned for the cable to be treated as just another long distance trunk route and they proposed that the then current PMG internal trunk signaling system should be employed on the cable. Since this was incompatible with the overseas systems into which we would be connected, OTC successfully demonstrated that special international equipment and a specialized overseas telecommunications terminal would be necessary to interconnect with other international systems.

With support from the Treasury, OTC finally received Ministerial approval to construct and own the terminal. After much searching, a suitable site was found in Oxford Street, Paddington and we found ourselves getting into the business of constructing a multi storey city building.

Since virtually all the terminal equipment represented new technology for OTC, Orm Cooper was selected to attend a training course in London, while Perc Day joined a group in New Zealand who were being instructed by an instructor brought out from UK in the specialized technique of jointing the special coaxial cable.

Despite our lack of experience at the beginning, all the installation work was satisfactorily completed on time and within budget. Finally, the big day came when the first section of the COMPAC cable to New Zealand was ready for service. My recollection is that Orm Cooper was the first person to talk on our first international telephone cable when power was anxiously switched on after the last cable splice was in place.

History records, of course, that this section of the cable was formally opened by Prime Minister Menzies on 9^th July, 1962. During arrangements for the ceremony, the organizers (now extending way beyond OTC) were caught in a diplomatic dilemma as to who should call whom between the Australian and NZ Prime Ministers. Protocol suggested that, since Australia was the senior Commonwealth partner, the first voice to be heard should be our PM’s – on the other hand what if something happened and our PM was left on the line calling “hello, hello” with no response?

A proper diplomatic solution was worked out. The call should originate in NZ, with an operator, who would have the NZ PM on the line waiting, then the phone at our end would ring and our PM would be the first to speak! Because of the exact timing required, our PM had been asked to make a short speech to the assembled people at the opening ceremony in Sydney, after which the call would take place. To guide him on timing, a light would blink when there was exactly one minute to go, so he could finish off what he was saying. When the light started blinking, the PM abruptly sat down virtually in mid sentence, leaving an embarrassingly long silent minute while nothing happened. Lots of fingers were crossed but the call came through exactly as planned and all was well.

The final section of COMPAC was completed in 1963 and the whole system through to UK was formally opened from London by her Majesty the Queen on 3^rd December 1963 (or 2^nd December depending on where you were!).

As for the round-the-world Commonwealth cable system, this plan came unstuck about 1961 when South Africa left the British Commonwealth, so the original cable plans routed via South Africa never eventuated. Also by then, the idea of a continuing British Commonwealth global submarine cable monopoly had been put to rest, being replaced by international joint ventures and the rapid development of satellite communications.

(Taken from Robert Brand’s website – Ed)

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Worldwide Who’s Who Names John Vossen Professional of the Year in Telecommunications

STANWELL PARK, NSW, AUSTRALIA, March 15, 2012 /Worldwide Who’s Who/ — John Vossen, Network Operations Centre Manager for Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., has been named a Worldwide Who’s Who Professional of the Year in Telecommunications. While inclusion in Worldwide Who’s Who is an honour, only a small selection of members in each discipline are chosen for this distinction. These special honourees are distinguished based on their professional accomplishments, academic achievements, leadership abilities, years of service, and the credentials they have provided in association with their Worldwide Who’s Who membership.

With five decades of professional experience, Mr. Vossen has honed his expertise in people management, process and procedure development, and operational system support. While working in the transmission field, he worked with undersea cable, satellite and microwave systems. Furthermore, Mr. Vossen helped transmit Apollo moon-landing pictures and moonwalk images to ABC in Australia. He also worked four years in Guam. Most recently, his work has entailed telephone switching, including international and mobile.

Mr. Vossen has always been intrigued by telecommunications, telephone exchanges, and satellite technology. He brings his experience and skills to the role of NOC manager for Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., a leading telecommunications solution provider. Mr. Vossen works with the network provider and mobile provider for Australia’s nationwide mobile network. He is currently building a project from the ground up and is about 20 percent through. It involves removing all outdated equipment and installing updated equipment for cellular telephone use. When the project is completed, there will be 7,500 cell sites throughout Australia.

In 1962, Mr. Vossen earned an intermediate certificate from Chevalier College. He earned certification in management leadership from Australian Institute of Management (AIM) and completed an Open Learning program of Statistical Mathematics from Deakin University’s Geelong Campus in 1993 and a diploma in audio engineering from the Australian Institute of Music in 2001. His professional affiliations include the Overseas Telecommunications Group and Ericsson Global Group.

Looking toward the future, Mr. Vossen aspires to establish a business with his wife and work from home. He enjoys gardening, photography, silver smithing and rock hunting in his free time.

 

(Press Release from Worldwide Who’s Who website – Ed)

Bob Emanuel writes – Well done Vosso! Couldn’t have happened to a better bloke.

 

Fire! At Doonside

Mike Tobin recalls an eventful night at Doonside.

I remember one night on the midnight shift at Doonside, sharing the shift with Keith Pointing, Keith was the STO and I was the technician.

At about 2:30 am LAPA (La Perouse Coast Radio Station)called to say that they did not expect any more traffic  from ships at sea, and we did not have any scheduled frequency changes till about 5:30 in the morning. Keith had settled down on the ops desk with a pillow and blanket and I had retired to a good book. About 3 o’clock the phone rang and I answered it only to find no one on the line, I settled back down to my book and about 15 minutes later the phone rang again a little frustrated I answered it again hoping that it was not kids just playing around as some times happened and went on all night.

At the same time I was aware of the smell of smoke, suddenly I put 2 and 2 together and charged of down stairs to the telephone exchange. The exchange had its own battery, 24 x 2 volts cells with about 1000 ampere/hour capacity. The battery connected to the exchange by a large positive and negative bus bar.

The wooden box that covered the bus bar was well alight and the flames were rapidly approaching the large pack of ISB drive cables that kept Doonside on the air.

The exchange was enclosed in a cyclone wire cage but fortunately the cyclone stopped about 800 mm above the floor I grabbed a fire extinguisher and rolled under the cyclone cage and gave the fire enough to at least contain it and rushed up stairs to awake Keith who was sleeping soundly unaware of the drama infolding.

I can remember not wanting to startle Keith so I shook him gently and when his eyes opened I told him the exchange was on fire and could he call the brigade whilst I tried to contain it.  Upon Keith realization of what I had said his eyes literally leapt out of his head, the phone by this stage had gone dead so we used the tie line to Paddo to get them to call the brigade who arrived very promptly and contained the fire to the exchange area.

At this time Keith and I were discussing the events and decided that we should let Eric Norris, the Station Manager, know the situation. I was dispatched to Eric’s House. For those of you that knew Eric you may recall he was completely deaf in one ear but few people were aware that he slept with his good ear to the pillow. The Norrises had a large chow dog who by this time was running thru the house barking loudly but even through all this Eric took about 30 minutes to wake. Just to finish the night of at about 6:30 the fire detector in the Number 2 30 Kilowatt transmitter got some smoke in main fan duct and went off that was the only alarm to go off all night.

I trust the humour and seriousness of the event may remind others of the joys of Doonside and Bringelly midnight shifts

(Mike is ex-Paddo, Ceduna, Carnarvon, Broadway and Doonside – Ed)

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OTC PERSONALITIES – 1

by Brian Collath

I just thought I’d give a few memories of a particular co-trainee (Dave Egan). I wonder where he is now?

During training at DCA and Gore Hill I was in every class with him.

Coming back at lunchtime from Gore Hill Tech he drove his VW beetle, and one day I hitched a ride with him back to DCA Waverton (I think Bob Smith was also in the car!).

We, in those days, had a half day of courses at Gore Hill Tech.  Anyway, I was in the back seat, tall Bob Smith was in the front passenger seat. Half way there, I looked to my right and on the floor, behind Dave, was, what looked like a brake master cylinder. This got me wondering where it came from. I gingerly looked down at Dave’s feet on the pedals and noted that the middle pedal was missing. It WAS the brake pedal, I kid you not!

Now ordinarily you can imagine that I would panic at this, that was until we had to go down that hill to Balls Head Road, past Waverton Station. I have got to tell you that this was terrifying having to negotiate it with only the handbrake. Thankfully we made it, and the VW beetle came to a rest by Dave getting out while going slowly with a brick in hand to place in front of the drivers’ side front wheel to stop it. I got out and said “Dave, never again!”

Dave turned up one day, it must have been winter, in a new flannelette shirt. Well actually, nobody really noticed the first day, because he turned up with the same shirt the next day. That’s when someone must have noticed (it wasn’t me). Because, on the third day, he had on the same shirt. Then I think most of us must have noticed something strange. Then, wait for it, he turned up the next day with the same shirt. Now blokes that age aren’t that really interested in fashion, but they are interested in personal freshness enough for one or the other of us to ask Dave “hey, Dave, we can’t but notice you’ve had on the same shirt for 4 days, don’t you think you should wash it?” Or something to that effect. But Dave’s response was cool and collected and he said “No, I went to Gowings (or something similar) and bought 5 shirts, all the same colour and pattern. How wrong could we have been in thinking he was a dirty grub!

Then when Dave graduated, he was posted to HO under Peter Gergely in Telex Ops.

I was at Paddo in the Telex Exchange Control Room. Every now and then, Dave would take the bus out to Paddo to do some work there. Well, he would come and take some measurements and so on, then go back to HO. But once or twice he’d do something similar by leaving HO, but instead of Paddo for work purposes, he’d quietly come in and sign-in at Paddo, then backpedal and leave, catching the bus to Randwick for the races, when they were on.

Dave is probably CEO of some corporation now.

(Brian is now retired and living in the Southern Highlands. He,  like me, enjoys building and listening to Single Ended Triode (valve) audio amplifiers – Ed)

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Communication Without Wires (2)

By Henry Cranfield

(This is the second instalment of Henry Cranfield’s CRS History)

When the Coastal Radio Service was first established, many of its early operators were post office telegraphists working in relatively comfortable offices in the cities and towns of Australia. Others came from the ranks of the Royal Australian Navy or British merchant ships, and still more were telegraphists recruit­ed from the various State railways.

These men were to enter a service which saw them at the forefront of new tech­nological advances in wireless communications. The first operators, although trained in Morse Code, were unfamiliar with the new radio equipment. Little formal training was offered until the Marconi School of Wireless opened in 1913 to train marine operators.

Operators signed up for a period of at least three years and could be sent to some of the most remote parts of Australia, and the Territories of Papua and New Guinea.

Some of the Papua and New Guinea regions were barely civilised. Operators were posted to small Government outposts or to remote mining sites where the native population had rarely seen a white man. Others were stationed in locations which were physically, to some, like paradise on earth.

Whatever their posting, most of these men had to suffer some physical and emotional hardships. In tropical postings there was the risk of disease; food supplies were sent at only monthly or bi-monthly intervals; fresh food was some­times scarce, and recreational facilities were limited.

For many, the greatest hardship was being away from family and friends for long periods of time. For some, the battle with loneliness became a mighty struggle.

There were, however, some material rewards for such privations. The cost of living in lonely outposts was negligible and could be a means of saving money; those posted to Papua and New Guinea escaped the rigours of the Depression and some grew to love the region, becoming part-time gold prospectors or plantation owners.

During World War II, operators in Papua and New Guinea played a vital role in the defence of Australia, but many barely escaped with their lives.

Despite these often difficult conditions, many operators remained with the CRS for the whole of their working lives.

The Coastal  Radio Station in  Adelaide opened on 1 October 1912 — the sixth coastal radio station to be built in Australia and the last of the capital city stations.

The station was constructed on Grand Junction Road in Rosewater, about three kilometres from the centre of Adelaide. It operated from 8 am to midnight every day of the week, and was one of the first points of contact for ships sailing south from Hong Kong and Japan.

Apart from its major function of listening for ships’ messages, Adelaide also handled traffic to and from the State telegraph system, and broadcast time signals to shipping.

When the Royal Australian Navy took control of the CRS in 1915, staff at VIA became naval personnel.

After World War I, the Postmaster General’s Department regained control of the Service, and made plans to upgrade the stations. These plans were shelved when the Coastal Radio Service changed hands yet again and came under the control of AWA in 1922.

Further developments followed: the introduction of short-wave radio commu­nication in 1923; the establishment of a radio telephone service between small ships of the Adelaide Steamship Company and the station in 1929; and the installation of a transmitter connected to Parafield airport for two-way radio communication between aircraft and airfield in 1934.

The Rosewater site for the Adelaide station was abandoned in 1963 when oper­ations moved to a new station built by OTC at McLaren Vale.

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 LAST WORD

A comment was made recently that the OTVA Newsletter is “techno-centric.” Have any of you got a story waiting to be told? Clerk, Engineer, Director – whoever of whatever section in OTC in which you worked.

I can edit it for publication if you like, so tell us your stories in your voice and let the world hear your story.

I like the idea of publishing more of OTC Personalities, following on from Brian Collath’s story in this edition – maybe you’d like to tell us of personalities in your circle of OTC colleagues.

See you at the next OTVA reunion in April at the NSW Bowlers Club.

The     Overheads Office     Bearers 20012–13 President: Peter Bull president@otva.com Phone:  0411 260 542 Secretary:  Will Whyte secretary@otva.com Phone: 0411 100 445 Interim Treasurer:  Bernie White Newsletter Editor: Bob Emanuel editor@otva.com Phone:     0412 062 236 or 02 4787 5558 Our     Website www.otva.com

OTVA Membership:

For those who do not receive their Newsletters via Australia Post an email will be sent out to all known email addresses to inform all members of those who are financial and the date in the form MM/YY.

If your name does not appear in the email our records indicate you are NOT currently financial

If you get a posted copy of the newsletter your current membership expiry date is shown on the top address line on the envelope.

To renew your membership, you can (i) either do an electronic funds transfer of $10 to the OTVA Bank account (email president@otva.com to obtain the details), OR

(ii) mail a cheque for $10 to

PO Box 702 Riverwood 2210

For EFT transactions ensure your name is included in the transaction.

 

OTVA ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING.

Friday 14 th June 2013 again at the Bowlers Club. The meeting will be followed by lunch in the Red Room.  More details later.

 

OTVA Newsletter Nov 2012 to view the OTVA Newsletter in colour with pictures

Overseas Telecommunications Veterans Newsletter

Registered Address: 805/41 Meredith Street BANKSTOWN 2200

ISSN 1322-1906 November 2012. Volume 13 Page 52

_____________________________________

 

COMPAC 50TH ANNIVERSARY

The 50th Anniversary of the opening of traffic on the COMPAC Cable in 2013 and you are invited to join in.

A subcommittee has been established and if you wish to contribute, contact Peter Bull, president@otva.com.

____________________

 

To renew your membership, you can (i) either do an electronic funds transfer of $10 to the OTVA Bank account (email president@otva.com to obtain the details), OR

(ii) mail a cheque for $10 to

PO Box 702 Riverwood 2210

For EFT transactions ensure your name is included in the transaction.

 

The articles published in the last newsletter were  reviewed by the committee.

All were considered interesting and the final decision was to present Henry with the  $50  for his article on Communication Without Wires.

The Overheads Office Bearers 20012–13 President: Peter Bull president@otva.com Phone:  0411 260 542 Secretary:  Will Whyte secretary@otva.com Phone:     0411 100445 Treasurer:  Bernie White (Interim). treasurer@otva.com Newsletter Editor: Bob Emanuel editor@otva.com Phone:     0412 062 236 or 02 4787     5558 or 02 9332 3930 OTVA Membership Subscription: $10     p.a. is due in May each year. Please     check your mailer as the indication “5/12″ or earlier indicates that     your subs are now due. Our Website www.otva.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Overseas Telecommunications Veterans Newsletter

 

Backrow – John Bennet (PAD ITMC), Bill Newman (Mgr Offshore Network Operations), Dave Kidd (Telegraph and Data Senior Engineer), Alan West (BWY ISTC and CNCC). Frontrow – Bob E, Gary “Sammy” Samuels (BWY ISTC), Donna Rampling (BWY Admin), Jeff Thwaites (BWY ISTC), Bob Collins (BWY ISTC and CNCC), Michelle Collins.
Jennie and your editor recently went on holidays to the North Cast of NSW. Bob Collins kindly asked us to stay at his place at Fernvale, 7 km south of Murwillumbah. I knew that he and Bill Newman lived in the Tweed Valley, but at a Saturday BBQ at Bob’s I wasn’t expecting this!
Ten ex-OTC staff at a Saturday BBQ at Bob C’s! There is an enclave of ex-OTC staff living around the Tweed Valley and they all socialise together frequently.
Bill Newman grew up in the Tweed Valley and when upon retirement he and Maureen (Mo) moved back up there. Bobby Collins visited, and according to local legend, after 12 bottles of red decided the Tweed had a better view than Chipping Norton – so he moved up. Michelle followed (though, like me, she keeps a terrace in Sydney), as did Dave Kidd, John Bennet and Sammy. Sammy ran into Allan at the supermarket so he and Donna

joined in with the rest of the crew. Jeff and Gaye Thwaites are looking for a place to buy in the Tweed as well and join in the day to day fun. Bob’s daughter Michelle, the only instance of a father/daughter team in OTC, lives close-by.
The day before we arrived they had all been out big game fishing followed by a sashimi and BBQ lunch. I’ve been told not to mention that Maureen is the best fisher of them all, landing a huge snapper.
Bill Newman describes their enviable lifestyle as “six days of the week are Sunday, and then there’s Wednesday” because on Wednesdays they head off to a local club for a long lunch. The local cabbies love it.
Alan is working on an offshore oil rig in WA (3 weeks on, 3 weeks off, 3 weeks on, 6 weeks off), and Donna is with the Education Department.
Everyone else is retired and looking very relaxed and happy with life. Bob C has the most complete metal workshop I have ever seen which he uses often.
They all keep themselves busy looking after their acreages and socialising.
We had a ball and it won’t be our last trip to the Tweed.
____
Fellow Members of the OTVA,
I hope that you and your families are well and enjoying life.
The OTVA web page (http://www.otva.com) and the BLOGs (https://www.otva.com/blog/) continue to enjoy very good patronage. This will be as a direct result of the good stories and notices (including recent OTVA Newsletters) that can be found there which can be used to keep OTVA members up to date with circumstances and events associated with ex-OTC personnel and their families.
Email continues to be a great source of communication with you our members and your committee will continue to pursue efficiencies to reduce costs by channelling as much information as possible via email and the BLOG pages of the OTVA web site. If you send an email to president@otva.com I will review it and where appropriate email it out to those on the email distribution list as well as upload it to the BLOG site.
Unfortunately our Treasurer, Alex Ebert, has resigned from the position after 14 months of service. Alex has been forced to take this action to focus more on his family and his personal life as well as his accountancy practice. I thank Alex for the spirit in which he took on the role as treasurer of the OTVA and his efforts since taking on that role in June 2011. The members of the OTVA Executive wish him the best for his future and look forward to catching up with him at one of the OTVA social events in the future.
The project to digitise Transit and Contact magazines is about 85% complete. It is our intention to transfer the files to DVD which can then be made available to financial members of the OTVA upon request. Kevin O’Brien has processed the scanned images and is building a capability for a keyword search. The DVD may still be available by the end of 2012 but will be very dependent upon whether we can get access to the missing copies for scanning and burning to DVD. I will be sending an email via the distribution list asking for access to the missing copies. Your assistance in this endeavour will be greatly appreciated.
We, your committee, have also received other hard copy documents such as the OTC Annual Reports, Invisible Bridges and other material relating to OTC or the history of telecommunications in Australia in the 20th Century that may be suitable for scanning and distribution but that will be a project for 2013.
I extend my sincere condolences to the families of our ex-OTC brothers and/or their partners who have departed this life since I last addressed you. We are saddened by their passing but are gladdened by the fullness of their rich and long lives. May They Rest In Peace.
Warmest regards,
Peter Bull
0411 260542
peterbull@otva.com
________________________________
Paddington Intercontinental Exchange
Ref. from Wikipedia:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXK#TXK2
TXK1
This code was used for the Plessey 5005T exchanges which was a 4 wire version of the standard 5005 (separate pair for transmit & receive). In the UK TXK2s were only used as an international gateway, initially at Wood Street (WS) exchange in the City of London. This switch had been previously sold by Plessey to the Overseas Telecommunications Commission Australia (OTC) for use as an international gateway at Sydney.
The British Post Office was planning with Plessey Ltd for a switch at Wood Street but with advanced facilities. Plessey was in difficulty with this development and could not make Wood Street work on time and in-budget. As OTC had replaced their 5005T with an Ericsson switch, it was air-freighted back to the UK in desperation to be put into service at Wood Street.
The 5005T was identical to the 5005A except for the 4 wire switching, the lack of subscriber line circuits and concentration stage (i.e. no distributors).
Plessey further supplied the British Post Office with TXK2 switches at DeHavilland ISC (Burnt Oak) and Mondial ISC in Central London. The first switch was similar technically to the Wood St Relief Unit, but the latter was larger and came with the developments of Codesender Router and Line Terminations for CCITT R2 (MF(C) with E&M line signalling).

From Kevin O’Brien who writes:-
After OTC installed & commissioned the Ericsson ARM, the British Post Office purchased the Paddo exchange from OTC.
It was installed in Wood Street, London and was named the “Wood Street Relief unit”.
I visited Wood Street in 1971 and asked if I could see the old Paddo exchange. There it was the same switch I used to work on in Sydney now “clacking” away on Atlantic circuits. To my surprise they had left the Australian labels on the test desk/rack key switches. I asked one of the guys working there at the time did he know the meaning of JTA and JFA.
He said he did not know what the letters stood for but he just knew them as one way outgoing/ incoming junctions.
We all had a chuckle after I informed them that the abbreviations stood for Junction from Australia JFA and junction to Australia JTA.
I don’t know if they ever changed the labels to Junction from/to England (JFE’s and JTE’s)??

________________________________
Communication Without Wires (1)
By Henry Cranfield

DEVELOPMENTS in radio technology in the late nineteenth century were rapid I and diverse.
In 1865, a Cambridge University Professor, James Clerk Maxwell, proposed his theory on the existence of electromagnetic waves. More than two decades later, their existence was confirmed in a practical demonstration by German physicist, Heinrich Hertz.
In the following decade, significant advances were made in refining Hertz’s experiments, including the work of Professor Eduard Branly in France and Sir Oliver Lodge in England.
But it was the work of a young Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, which took the new science out of the laboratory and into the ‘real’ world.
Marconi lived with his parents in Pontecchio, near Bologna. From boyhood, he had been fascinated with science and in 1894, after studying the work of Hertz, he began his first experiments using electromagnetic waves. Using refined equipment and incorporating a Morse key he found he could send signals from one part of the house to another.
Soon his experiments became more ambitious; his most significant advance beganing0 to attach aerials and earths to both transmitter and receiver. He then realised that the distance over which signals could be sent was relative to the size and eleva¬tion of the cylindrical aerials.
In 1895, Marconi offered to demonstrate his new signaling system to the Italian Government. His offer was declined. Undeterred, he sailed for England, hoping to interest the British Government in his inventions.
In June 1896 Marconi applied for, and was granted, the first patent for wireless telegraphy. The following year he formed the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company and built the very first coastal radio station; an experimental station on the Isle of Wight.
Within a few years, a chain of radio stations had been completed around the English coast. Marconi continued to conduct some amazing demonstrations, the most spectacular of which was to pass radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901.
In 1901, the Marconi Company approached the Australian Government with a proposal to connect Australia and New Zealand by wireless, but it was not until 1906 that the company was granted a temporary licence to conduct trials between Devonport in Tasmania and Queenscliff in Victoria.
The Postmaster General’s Department was given full control of wireless commu¬nications in Australia under the Wireless Telegraphy Act, passed by the Australian Parliament in 1905.
By 1909, the threat of war was increasing, and the Government decided to estab¬lish wireless telegraphic stations around Australia’s coast as a means of gathering naval intelligence, and for the safety of life at sea.
Tenders were called to erect two high-powered stations in Sydney and Perth. The successful bidder was the newly formed Australasian Wireless Company.
The company’s activities were further broadened when, in 1910, it was granted a licence to operate an experimental radio station at the back of the Bulletin offices in Sydney.
This station later moved to the Australia Hotel, which became Australia’s first coastal radio station after the Australasian Wireless Company was granted a licence to handle public traffic to and from ships at sea. It closed in 1912 when the Pennant Hills radio station opened.
Another licence was granted to Father Archibald Shaw, a priest and former tele¬graphist, to build an experimental wireless station in Randwick, Sydney. Later, Father Shaw began manufacturing wireless equipment from a site next to this station; he also gained a licence to operate a radio station on King Island in Bass Strait.
With a change in Government in 1910, the Prime Minister appointed a wireless expert — Graham Balsillie — to speed up the construction of the wireless stations. Melbourne Radio was the first station completed, opening on 8 February 1912.
A series of legal disputes between the Australasian Wireless Company, Telefunken and the Marconi Company led to the formation of Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd (AWA Ltd) in 1913.Meanwhile, the construction of coastal radio stations continued with 19 stations being erected between 1912 and 1914,
In 1912 the Australian Government passed the Navigation Act which made it compulsory for all ships in Australian waters carrying more than 50 passengers to have wireless apparatus.
The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 led to nations around the world adopt¬ing a uniform code of marine safety standards and procedures — the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) Convention of 1914. Some years earlier, SOS had been adopted as the standard distress signal.
During World War I, the Department of the Navy took control of the stations; this responsibility reverted to the Postmaster General’s Department in 1920.
Throughout this period, Ernest Fisk, managing director of AWA, had been expanding the company’s commercial ventures.
In 1918, he conducted successful trials from his home in Wahroonga, Sydney, in which the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, sent a message direct from London to Australia.
The British Post Office then proposed building a chain of stations at regular inter¬vals across the world, but the Australian Government strongly objected, fearing that Australia would be left isolated at the end of the chain.
In 1920, AWA submitted its own plan for a direct Australia-Britain wireless link; this proposal was accepted by the Australian Government in 1922.
The agreement gave AWA exclusive rights to build and operate any stations necessary to establish direct wireless contact between Australia and England. AWA also took control of the existing radio stations.
After it took over the Coastal Radio Service (CRS), AWA embarked on a program of modernisation and split the Coastal Radio Service into two administrative arms: The Coastal Radio Service, comprising the stations of mainland Australia, Thursday Island, and Port Moresby and its outstations in Papua; and the Island Radio Service, made up of the New Guinea stations and several remote island stations around Australia’s shores.
In England, Marconi was experimenting with short-wave technology; the first short-wave message was received in Australia on 6 March 1924.
In 1925, AWA introduced a radio telephone service for ships at sea, but the main form of communication still remained wireless telegraphy. On 8 April 1927, the Australia-Britain beam wireless service opened, and AWA established a new receiv¬ing station at La Perouse.
Most stations in the CRS were equipped with short-wave radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A direct service was opened between Fiji and Sydney Radio in 1928 and Sydney Radio became the radio hub of the Pacific.
By the mid-1930s several coastal radio stations were used as control centres for aeradio services.
The CRS played an important role in Australia’s defence during World War II; its stations participated in the vital Coast Watching Scheme and provided links between naval ships and the Royal Australian Navy communication stations.
After the war ended, the CRS was purchased from AWA by the Australian Government, who administered the service until OTC took operational control on 1’February 1947.

Part 2 Next Edition.
(My apologies for the inconsistent layout as I could not edit Henry’s copy – Ed).
_____________________________________

THE COMMERCIAL BRANCH, INTERPLEX AND
OTC’S NEW YORK OFFICE.

By Tom Barker

(Originally published in October 2006 Newsletter)

When George Maltby established the Commercial Branch, in the 1960’s, his intention was to get OTC involved with its customers more closely and to establish a better public recognition of OTC by showing an interest in business customers and learning of any problems which they may have encountered in their international communications.

At that time, our closest customers were those businesses which regularly sent telegrams to the overseas offices of their principals, customers or suppliers. These firms usually operated “Four Figure Accounts” which were used to identify the customer to OTC and simplify billings. Many of these customers were moving from telegrams to telex, as OTC’s international telex facilities became more efficient and more generally available.

Prior to the opening of the COMPAC cable, telex channels were derived from Hasler TOR Telegraphy On Radio) equipment, operating on HF radio paths and the circuit switching was performed manually by OTC operators, who supervised each call to ensure satisfactory service delivery.

With the opening of the COMPAC and SEACOM cables, telex channels were provided via FMVFT equipment operating over cable voice channels (24 channels per system) which not only provided more reliable services, but at a much lower cost to OTC.

The Australian domestic telex network, provided by the PMG Dept. at that time, was also growing quickly and after subscriber dialling between all Australian subscribers was introduced (using keyboard signalling, rather than rotary dials), the customer take-up was very fast. This presented OTC with an opportunity which had never existed before, to offer its customers an automated service, for which OTC could bill, within the terms of the Overseas Telecommunications Act of 1946.

This proved to be the most profitable service which OTC ever offered and was the basis for the its very politically popular Annual Reports and handsome dividends to its shareholder (the Australian Government) over many years. It was also the motivator for OTC to engage in vigorous debates with the PMG Dept and later, Telecom, about the introduction of International Subscriber Dialling for telephone services.

The first stage of OTC’s Automatic International Telex service was achieved by a novel use of Siemens and Halske tape reperforators (FRXD’s in the S & H language) which monitored each call, recording the answer-backs of the caller and the called number and the time of connection, plus a “MOM” entry at each completed minute of the connection.

The tapes from these machines were analysed by OTC Accounts Branch and the customers were billed directly by OTC.

The operating procedure for Australian telex customers was to dial 020, which would connect them to the international telex exchange (at Paddington) which would indicate by signalling “INTLX” that an international number could be called. Such calls had to prefixed with the appropriate country code, which was an opportunity for OTC to produce and distribute customer literature, which provided operating 124 instructions, country codes and rates for OTC telex services.

FRXD on display at Bankstown Museum.

These booklets were not mailed out to customers, but hand-delivered by OTC Commercial Branch representatives, who used the opportunity to establish a relationship with the customer and arrange for future regular visits to enquire about service related matters.

The first stage of this program was the opening of twenty automatic telex circuits to London and the customer response was so good that it was necessary to embark on a major engineering program, to meet the demand.

From my (imperfect) memory Ross Beaumont was the engineer who carried that first project, but it lead to the acquisition of the first international telex exchange with toll ticketing.

Once established, the automatic telex service became a vehicle for OTC to involve itself in customer service matters in a way which was never possible before. One of the things which developed out of that involvement was the realisation that OTC was being outsmarted by a competitor. With the benefit of detailed customer billings, which identified all international telex calls, Commercial Branch staff were able to identify customers who were making many calls to the same number, on a regular basis, which would justify their leasing a private line service to that particular overseas destination, which was often the office of their principals.

International Private Lines were almost invariably “sub-speed” telegraph circuits, at that time, a normal 50 baud (66 wpm) telex circuit being divided into four “quarter-speed” circuits by Hasler equipment.

OTC staff would analyse customer billings over several months, and prepare a written analysis for the customer’s information. This would be followed up by a sales proposal, which would cost-justify the customer leasing a private line to his most frequently called destination. OTC Commercial Branch Staff took this work very seriously and there was good-natured competition between staff, to achieve the best sales figures.

It was at this point that we would often become aware that the customer was installing a private line, not to London or New York, or where-ever his main overseas correspondent was, but to Hong Kong. The customer would use this line to transmit all his overseas telex traffic, not just to London or Hong Kong, but to everywhere. OTC had become the unwitting victim of the Cable and Wireless MSC (Message Switching Centre) in Hong Kong, a battery of Univac 418 mainframe computers, engineered to handle private telegraph networks, customised to the needs of each individual company.

Such systems and services were being offered by many international carriers, at that time, but the C & W MSC had embarked upon a campaign to target Australian telex customers, probably because they knew that OTC did not have this capability. It was apparent that OTC would continue to lose business this way, unless it had a computer-based message switching system to offer its customers, so that a network of private lines, connecting to every major office of any corporation around the world, could communicate, via the Sydney-based switch.

This entailed selling the service, not just to our Australian customers, but to the corporations (usually multi-national) whose headquarters could be based anywhere in the world.

After OTC management were made aware of the competitive disadvantage that OTC was suffering, in this situation, it was decided to install a message switching centre for private line networks and it was to be called Interplex.

At first the Interplex system comprised a number of small, stand-alone computer systems, allocated on a one-per-customer basis, but this arrangement proved too inflexible to meet all our customer needs, so an arrangement of General Automation (GA16/64) mini-computers, called “Mini-Plus” systems, was installed at Paddington, and these were capable of meeting a much
wider range of customer requirements.

From that time on, the competition between OTC’s Interplex service and the C & W MSC was very keen. We won some very good accounts and we lost some important ones to our competitors. It was an area of OTC’s business which was truly engaged in competition for business with an aggressive alternative supplier, an unfamiliar scenario for many who had spent their entire careers employed in monopoly carrier situations.

One of the facts which became apparent to those of us engaged in this business, was that 45% of OTC’s corporate business was with companies based in the USA. We began to participate in International Telecom Expos, (such as the ICA) in the U.S and we soon realised that OTC needed to have a permanent presence in the U.S. if we were to succeed in this area of business.

At that time, OTC management was not enthusiastic about having a representative office in another country, to talk to customers, because there was a mindset that OTC was a monopoly and didn’t need to compete for business. Fortunately this did not apply to people like George Maltby, who took the proposal to establish an office in New York, to the board a number of times, before finally gaining approval, in 1984.

The proviso which we were obliged to work with, was that no capital expenditure could be made, so everything had to be leased (presumably so we would not have to write anything off if the venture failed).

I walked the streets of New York, trying to find somewhere to hang up OTC’s shingle, and finally took a space in a serviced office business, located in Fifth Avenue, near the Rockefeller Centre.

I was assisted in the task of setting up this office by some good friends in British Telecom International, who were setting up their own New York office at that time, a much more elaborate, permanent and impressive affair than OTC’s modest presence.

This being OTC’s first overseas-based office, a number of things had to be considered which were unprecedented in its experience.

One important detail was the selection of staff and the length of their terms in that post. I decided that three years was probably the most sensible term length, as it takes some time to become accustomed to working in a foreign country and also time to prepare for ones return home, so three years would allow a useful time in the job, once settled in.

Trevor Duff was selected to fill the Manager position and Ravi Bahtia his assistant. For our official opening, George Maltby prevailed upon an old friend, the Australian Ambassador to the United States, Sir Robert Cotton, KCMG, to officiate, and George selected the Waldorf Astoria as the venue.

Our OTC PR section arranged for a New York firm to set up the location (the Ballroom) and the catering for the event.

Inviting Sir Robert to officiate was a masterstroke. Although Americans are proud not to be part of the British Empire (or what’s left of it) they salivate at the presence of Royalty or British Nobles. Their responses to our invitations were overwhelming. On the
night of the event we were blown away by the number of industry leaders who attended. It was a stunning success.

For me, the two biggest thrills were when I talked for some time to Warren Buffet (about his buying Western Union Telegraph) and when Mike Ford, the head of British Telecom International, said to me (very quietly) “You beat us, Tom”. They had held their New York Office official opening a week before us and we both knew that what Mike said was true.

The opening of the New York office not

(To be concluded. I thought this story was well worth publishing again – Ed).
__________________________________
COMPAC 50TH ANNIVERSARY
The 50th Anniversary of the opening of traffic on the COMPAC Cable in 2013 and you are invited to join in.
A subcommittee has been established an if you wish to contribute, contact Peter Bull, president@otva.com.
_______________
To renew your membership, you can (i) either do an electronic funds transfer of $10 to the OTVA Bank account (email president@otva.com to obtain the details), OR
(ii) mail a cheque for $10 to
PO Box 702 Riverwood 2210
For EFT transactions ensure your name is included in the transaction.

NSW SEPTEMBER REUNION
MIDDAY – SEPTEMBER 14TH
NSW BOWLERS CLUB 99YORK ST SYDNEY.

The following contribution from Tom Barker elaborates on the slide rule that was developed in Australia after WWII with the assistance of  Joe Reed:

REED_Riddle_Solved

 

 

Submarine Co-axial Cable Testing and “Clark’s Fall of Potential Test”

 

By Henry Cranfield.

 

(This bit of OTC history is rather technical in nature, but it really shows what we were made of, how OTC folks made a difference in international telecommunications. I consider their collective wisdom in this issue as legendary – Ed)

This article  was written  as  little acknowledgment  in later years was made in OTC of the skills required to obtain accurate coaxial cable fault locations and I am indebted to Cass Cousens and Dick Pitt from C&W,  Peter Whisson, Trevor Thatcher and Percy Day from OTC  for their help and encouragement which raised my interest in the subject which I still have.

The first submarine telegraph cable was laid from England to France in 1849 and the first Transatlantic cable from UK to Canada in 1868, The cables provided far more problems than those used on the land,  due to the use of poor insulation (Gutta – Percha) and the poor purity of the copper used in the conductors which greatly attenuated the signals causing the galvanometers employed to hardly move. Also the high capacitance resulted (due to the use of Gutta –  Percha as the insulation material) in a time lag and mutilation of the signal sent The original methods employed to overcome these problems were to raise the voltage of the transmitted signals which in itself caused problems due the poor insulation. Peak voltages up to 2000V, being employed. The second proposal was to improve the receiving instrument’s sensitivity.

Two Englishmen, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin)  and Edward Whitehouse examined the associated problems with Lord Kelvin determining that the strength of the signals followed ‘The Inverse Square Law’ and he published a paper on same. Whitehouse disputed Kelvin’s claims and said that high voltages were the requirement. He used an induction coil and voltages up to 2000V for transmission, which enabled the use of a standard galvanometer at the far end to prove his point. However, the high voltages used caused cable failure and was abandoned.

 Johann Gauss and Wilhelm Weber invented a ‘Mirror Galvanometer in1833 which enabled telegraph signals to be detected and displayed by a point of light. It was far more sensitive than those used at that time. This instrument was used by Lord Kevin on the first transatlantic cable and Lord Kelvin developed his own instrument later..

Kelvin’s galvanometer coil gave greater sensitivity and enabled very small movements of the coil to be used by means of a reflected light source. This he patented in 1858.  It was still used as a detector  in DC cable testing until the mid 1970’s.  The capacitance problem was resolved by using positive and negative voltages of the same magnitude to represent dots and dashes. This required a special key with two levers to send the required polarity and to ground the cable between pulses and it was known as a ‘Cable Key’ and was used until the ceasing of the systems in the 1950’s. Thompson also invented the siphon recorder that used an ink jet and enabled the signals to be written down on a tape and usage of this was licensed to the various cable companies

D.C. Cable Testing. On Coaxial Submarine cable Systems.

To measure cable break locations, well known D.C. telegraph test techniques were employed using a ‘Wheatstone Bridge and Mirror galvanometer as a balance indicator’ together with accurate standard resistance boxes and capacitors (Usually 1 or 2 microfarads) These tests required considerable skill on long cables to achieve accurate results, especially where varying ‘Earth Currents’ were encountered.

It was also found that due to modern coaxial systems having composite inner conductors of copper and steel, some of the formulae used previously were not applicable. Another factor was that the much improved insulation materials used, increased the capacitance and this caused a long time-constant.

Fault location apparatus known as Submarine Repeater Monitoring Equipment (SRME) such as those supplied for the Compac and Seacom cable systems also proved unsatisfactory due to the capacitance of the cable making the pulses virtually unreadable. In the case of SRME 15 &17 used on Seacom, even the use of a high quality oscilloscope as the detector, required many hours of fruitless effort as one had to count the number of repeaters viewed (99 repeaters between Madang and Cairns). The most successful tests employed were the ‘Overlap Tests’ of Anderson and Kennelly or that modified by Johnson & Schonau.  With intermittent disconnections of the inner conductor the method of Wald can be used or ‘Murphy’s mixed Charge test’.  These  were all developed for submarine telegraph cables which had solid copper conductors. These tests required much skill at both ends of the cable to obtain satisfactory results.

Further problems were caused by the valve repeaters. The heaters in valve repeaters heat up by the passage of the test current. This causes an increase in resistance, which complicates the location if current is applied for more than a minute. (The cold value of the resistance of a repeater is measured at 5 milliamps and is given in the splice sheets). The time it takes for the system to cool down to enable useful measurements to be taken is 16 hours. In the case of transistorized systems the measurements are still taken at 5 Milliamps.

As the dielectric resistance of modern cables is very high ‘Fall of Potential Tests’ may be used to locate dielectric faults and give very accurate results. It must also be acknowledged that power feed readings of voltage and current at the time of the break, may also give an approximate location. System safety is also of paramount importance as the high insulation resistance enables high voltages to remain on the system unless the ends are earthed.

The Fall Of Potential Test.

In 1863 Latimer Clark put forward the ‘Fall  of Potential Test’ which was superseded by the ‘Overlap Test’ twenty years later. This came about due to leakage and poor dialect resistance of the insulating material. One further factor was the inability to measure, accurately and speedily, very small voltages, until the advent of the digital voltmeter.

The principle is very simple. A battery is connected between earth at one end of the cable through a known resistance ( R = 10,000 Ohms) and earth, the distant end being free, (See Figure 1) the potential to earth is measured at the points indicated.

The current flowing through the resistance and the cable, up to the fault, is equal to:

(V1-V2/R)

V3 is the potential to earth at the fault, so that (V2 – V3) represents the voltage drop along the cable to the fault. By Ohms Law, R= E/I   so that the distance to the fault is:

X= R(V2  –  V3)

V1  –  V2

This formula assumes that the potential measuring device has infinite resistance.

However, the input resistance of the meter may cause problems due to errors introduced in the location of the fault. This problem may be overcome by using the following  formula:

X =       MR(N(V2-V3 ) –V3L

MN(V1-V2 ) – (R ( NV2 + MV3 ).

 Where M&N are the resistances of the meters at the near and far end of the cable respectively and L is the approximate CR of the faulty cable.

 

The Value of “R”

It must be noted that the accuracy of the value of “R” must be known as the accuracy of the location is dependent on this. Thus the value of R must be measured by means of a “Bridging Measurement’ and if under 10,000 ohms made up to this figure by means of a resistance box with 0.1 ohm steps. If over 10,00 ohms then the figure obtained from the ‘bridging measurement is used in the formula.

Earth Potentials.

It is most necessary to measure earth potentials. Difference always exists between the ends of the cable due to natural phenomena beyond the testers control.  These must be measured with respect to the cable and corrections made for same when measuring the applied voltage.

  When the polarities of the earth and the applied voltage are the same, the former must be subtracted from the latter, and when they are opposites they must be added.

 

Effect of the Meter Input Resistance

 

In the practical case as in figure 2, if the potential measuring device, M, draws any current at all, V2 and V3 will be reduced due to the additional IR drop, across R and V3 will be further reduced by the voltage drop due to the current flowing beyond the fault through Y.

 

Fig 2 Effect of Meter Input Resistance

 

Seacom Experience.

At Madang, we had a number of breaks in the Cairns–Madang section due mainly to earth tremors.

One particular  afternoon  we suffered a cable ‘trip-off’ and instituted the normal practice of sending messages  via Guam  and putting our Radio Transmitter ‘on air’ etc.

We then conducted normal DC tests and despite all our efforts, neither Cairns nor us could  get a fault  location. So we awaited the arrival of the C&W cable ship ‘Retriever’ for more expertise. They too came up with Nil result.  So after Dick Pitt, the cable engineer, talked to London, it was decided we would try Clark’s Fall of Potential test. This required a digital voltmeter for Cairns and Madang  which was forwarded from Sydney and Trevor Thatcher was dispatched  to assist in Madang, We also learned it was necessary to do a large number of readings and average the results for the final figure. So I went down to our local surveyor’s office and borrowed a ‘Facit’ mechanical calculating machine, while the ‘Retriever’ lent us a junior cable engineer to help with the calculations .We finally located the fault as being off Lae and the cable ship brought up the cable to find that the centre conductor had been parted.  However, the heat that had been generated at the time of the break, had caused sealing of the break, hence we had an open circuit within the cable sheath. It appears that this was a rare happening and the cause was put down to debris from the Markham River which was in flood due to it being the wet season pushing debris out to sea which caught a repeater and pushed it down the slope on the sea bottom as it is the perimeter of ‘The Solomon’s Deep’

It was the first time ever that the test had been used anywhere and the piece of cable was sent to C&W in London for their museum. We felt quite excited as it was a world first and since adopted as a standard test on coaxial cable systems and is also incorporated into the new ‘Tinsley’ cable test-set which does the tests automatically.

Thus OTC, through Des Kinnersley in Cairns, Trevor Thatcher and your writer in Madang, achieved a ‘World First’. Something we are very proud of!

Developments

With the introduction of transistorized coaxial System repeaters and Fibre optics, there has been much research carried out and the testing made semi-automatic, thus eliminating the skills previously required. Also the introduction of transistorized repeaters and Fibre optics, together with improved instrumentation, simplified the former manual skills and brought about greater accuracy and longer cable lengths. The UK instrument makers, ‘Tinsley’ from the UK, in conjunction with Cable and Wireless (C and W), have now sophisticated test sets to cover these requirements. Having had the luxury of trying their Mark 1 version on a Guam –Tokyo cable, for which Pat Cousins of C and W was the principal consultant, much progress has been made but it all comes at a cost.

Seacom Cable Physical Characteristics

The Cable was known as Lightweight Mk.1 With a diameter of O.99 inches

Inner conductor Resistance                  2.9 Ohms/nautical Mile

Outer conductor Resistance                  1.5 ohms/nautical Mile

Dielectric Resistance greater than 0.5 X 10 Meg Ohms/Nautical Mile

Breaking Strain                                     7.7 Tons

Weight in air                                         2.2 Tons/nautical Mile

Weight .in water                                   0 .6 tons /Nautical Mile

Mean Characteristic Impedance at 50 KHz.   44.5 Ohms

To view the entire Newsletter including photos click here: OTVA NEWSLETTER March 2012

OVERSEAS TELECOMMUNICATIONS VETERANS ASSOCIATION

 

55^th ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING MINUTES

Meeting held at NSW Bowler’s Club on Friday 17 June, 2010 at 11am.

Members present:              Ernie Anthoney, Tom Barker, Ross Beaumont, Peter Bull, Ross Craig, Alex Ebert, Bob Emanuel, Allan Hennessy, Jeff Hindwood, Ray Hookway, Brian Hoschke, Bill Jolly, Colin Kelly, Arthur Major, John McDermott, Ted Miles, Don Montgomery, Keith McCredden, Maurie O’Connor, Geoff Oldman, John Phillips, Trevor Pike, David Richardson, Jim Simpson, Tony Stuart, Cyril Vahtrick, Bernie White, Brian Woods, Neil Yakalis.

Apologies:                           Chris Bull, Henry Cranfield, Bob Dentskevich, Joe Dingli, John Eades, Fred Kannard, Bob Lions, George Maltby, Noel Martin, John Mattes, Brian Nell, Doug Temperley, Ken Theaker, Brian Tudehope, Attilio Ventura, Will Whyte, Don Withers.

Opening and Welcome:    The president opened the meeting and welcomed those present.

One minutes silence           was observed to remember those members who had passed away in the last year.

 

Minutes:                                It was moved by Tom Barker and seconded by Bob Emanuel to confirm the minutes of the last Annual General Meeting held 18 June 2010.

President’s Annual Report:

Welcome all to the 2011 Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the Overseas Telecommunications Veterans Association (OTVA)

Congratulations to the members of the outgoing Committee whose achievements in 2010-11 are:

s  The organisation of the regular social events at which our members celebrate the camaraderie of the OTC family through our collective  memories; and

s  the continuing cataloguing of OTC memorabilia stored in the Telstra Museum at Bankstown; and

s  the ongoing engagement of our members to identify how our members want to be engaged and what you want from your Committee; and

s  the progression of actions taken to change the method of delivery of the OTVA Newsletter to meet the requirements & expectations of the OTVA membership; and

s  the enhancement of the OTVA Newsletter by bringing a different set of skills and perspective to the task of providing readers with interesting and topical stories that rekindle our memory and imagination; and

s  the ongoing enhancement of the OTVA web site to provide members with greater access to communications with each other and access to information & stories considered vital to continuing to tell the story of OTC and the history of telecommunications in Australia in the 20^th century.

Once again the membership of the OTVA fluctuated in 2010/11 with the passing of several of our members and its extended family and the introduction of several new members. The current membership of the OTVA stands at 219 with 95 financial, another 100 up for renewal this month and the remainder unfinancial for no more than 2 years.

Please join with me for a minutes silence for our friends and colleagues that passed away in the last 12 months.

I thank you the membership of the OTVA for the support that you have given to me and the other members of the OTVA Committee over the past 12 months. Your encouragement is what keeps the OTVA progressing forward.

I thank my fellow Committee members for their support and energy in the last 12 months and look forward to continuing our good working relationship over the next 12 months.

Treasurer’s Annual Report:            The Treasurer, Bernie White, reported that our funds were down by approximately $1,000 this year due to a fall in subscriptions, however were able to subsidize the annual Christmas reunion.  The Treasurer thanked Ken Theaker and Tony Farrugia for their assistance in auditing the accounts.  The President noted that Bernie has decided not to nominate for the position of Treasurer this year and thanked him for his many years of devoted service to the OTVA.

 

Life Membership               The President nominated Allan Hennessy for Life Membership of the OTVA and presented him with a framed certificate.  Tom Barker acknowledged Allan’s long contribution to the OTVA and the meeting agreed by acclamation.

 

Election of Office Bearers:

Tom Barker acted as Returning Officer. 

After declaring all positions vacant, the Returning Officer called for nominations and the Meeting resolved unanimously to make the following appointments:

President                                Peter Bull

Vice-Presidents                     Will Whyte and Henry Cranfield

Secretary                               Will Whyte

Treasurer                               Alex Ebert

Committee Members:        The above office bearers and

                                                John Eades

                                                Bob Emanuel      

                                                Colin Kelly

                                                Allan Hennessy

Bernie White

                                                Ray Hookway

                                                David Richardson

Auditors:                                Ken Theaker and Tony Farrugia.

Incoming President’s Remarks:

I thank you, the membership of the OTVA, for electing me to the position of President of the OTVA once again.  In accepting the presidency of the OTVA I recognise that your support is a reflection of the excellent work performed by the Committee of the OTVA throughout 2010/11 and welcome the challenges that will confront us in the next 12 months.

I congratulate Bernie White for his 12 years of dedication to the Committee and the membership of the OTVA. I thank him for the excellent job that he has done in managing finances of the OTVA in the face of the GFC and its flow on effects within the financial environment in Australia. He has left the OTVA in excellent financial position.

I welcome aboard Alex Ebert, son of Tony Ebert, who has accepted the roles and responsibilities of the Treasurer of the OTVA for the next 12 months. It would be most difficult for the OTVA to continue to operate without an efficient and effective Treasurer. I look forward to working him in this capacity for the next 12 months and thank him for accepting this role.

I congratulate the other members who have been nominated and accepted positions on the Executive for year 2010/11.

I look forward to working with this team over the next 12 months to meet the challenges and deliver satisfactory outcomes to the membership of the OTVA.

In the next 12 months the Executive will continue to improve the flow of information to you, the members of the OTVA, and we commit to listen to you in relation to what you want to see as benefits from being members of the OTVA

We, your Committee, require you the members of the OTVA to tell us how you want the OTVA to evolve and grow over the next few years and what vision you have for the 5 year plan for the OTVA. To this end we will continue to seek your input.

Once again thank you for this opportunity.

General Business:              1.  It was agreed to grant free membership and newsletters to any remaining female OTVA members.

                                                2.  There was some discussion about the archival and artifact materials stored at the Bankstown Telstra Museum.  The President expressed his concern about the difficulties of keeping the Asset Register up-to-date.

                                                3.  It was noted that the Centenary of Telecommunications will be celebrated in 2013. Strong interest was expressed in OTVA being involved in this event.  This matter will be discussed in more detail at committee meetings, in future editions of the newsletter and on the OTVA website blog.

                                                4.  It was agreed that Vales would no longer be included in Newsletters.  The President requested members to send him any interesting photos of themselves or of OTC activities that could be used to build a historical album.

                                                5.  In order to reduce the workload associated with distribution of the Newsletters, it was agreed to utilize electronic transfer more effectively.  It was pointed out that the newsletters are already posted on the OTVA website.  The President invited all members who are willing to receive a soft copy of the newsletter to send him their e-mail address.

                                                6.  A motion of appreciation was moved for the amount of work that Chris Bull puts into maintaining and improving the OTVA website.

Meeting closed:                   The meeting closed at 12:30pm after which most members stayed for an informal lunch.

Peter Bull

President

OVERSEAS TELECOMMUNICATIONS VETERANS ASSOCIATION

 55^th ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING MINUTES

 Meeting held at NSW Bowler’s Club on Friday 17 June, 2010 at 11am.

 Members present:              Ernie Anthoney, Tom Barker, Ross Beaumont, Peter Bull, Ross Craig, Alex Ebert, Bob Emanuel, Allan Hennessy, Jeff Hindwood, Ray Hookway, Brian Hoschke, Bill Jolly, Colin Kelly, Arthur Major, John McDermott, Ted Miles, Don Montgomery, Keith McCredden, Maurie O’Connor, Geoff Oldman, John Phillips, Trevor Pike, David Richardson, Jim Simpson, Tony Stuart, Cyril Vahtrick, Bernie White, Brian Woods, Neil Yakalis.

 Apologies:                           Chris Bull, Henry Cranfield, Bob Dentskevich, Joe Dingli, John Eades, Fred Kannard, Bob Lions, George Maltby, Noel Martin, John Mattes, Brian Nell, Doug Temperley, Ken Theaker, Brian Tudehope, Attilio Ventura, Will Whyte, Don Withers. 

 Opening and Welcome:    The president opened the meeting and welcomed those present.

 One minutes silence           was observed to remember those members who had passed away in the last year.

 

Minutes:                                It was moved by Tom Barker and seconded by Bob Emanuel to confirm the minutes of the last Annual General Meeting held 18 June 2010.

President’s Annual Report:

Welcome all to the 2011 Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the Overseas Telecommunications Veterans Association (OTVA)

Congratulations to the members of the outgoing Committee whose achievements in 2010-11 are:

• The organisation of the regular social events at which our members celebrate the camaraderie of the OTC family through our collective  memories; and
• the continuing cataloguing of OTC memorabilia stored in the Telstra Museum at Bankstown; and
• the ongoing engagement of our members to identify how our members want to be engaged and what you want from your Committee; and
• the progression of actions taken to change the method of delivery of the OTVA Newsletter to meet the requirements & expectations of the OTVA membership; and
• the enhancement of the OTVA Newsletter by bringing a different set of skills and perspective to the task of providing readers with interesting and topical stories that rekindle our memory and imagination; and
• the ongoing enhancement of the OTVA web site to provide members with greater access to communications with each other and access to information & stories considered vital to continuing to tell the story of OTC and the history of telecommunications in Australia in the 20^th century.

 Once again the membership of the OTVA fluctuated in 2010/11 with the passing of several of our members and its extended family and the introduction of several new members. The current membership of the OTVA stands at 219 with 95 financial, another 100 up for renewal this month and the remainder unfinancial for no more than 2 years.

 Please join with me for a minutes silence for our friends and colleagues that passed away in the last 12 months.

 I thank you the membership of the OTVA for the support that you have given to me and the other members of the OTVA Committee over the past 12 months. Your encouragement is what keeps the OTVA progressing forward.

 I thank my fellow Committee members for their support and energy in the last 12 months and look forward to continuing our good working relationship over the next 12 months.

 Treasurer’s Annual Report:            The Treasurer, Bernie White, reported that our funds were down by approximately $1,000 this year due to a fall in subscriptions, however were able to subsidize the annual Christmas reunion.  The Treasurer thanked Ken Theaker and Tony Farrugia for their assistance in auditing the accounts.  The President noted that Bernie has decided not to nominate for the position of Treasurer this year and thanked him for his many years of devoted service to the OTVA.

 

Life Membership               The President nominated Allan Hennessy for Life Membership of the OTVA and presented him with a framed certificate.  Tom Barker acknowledged Allan’s long contribution to the OTVA and the meeting agreed by acclamation.

 

Election of Office Bearers:

Tom Barker acted as Returning Officer. 

After declaring all positions vacant, the Returning Officer called for nominations and the Meeting resolved unanimously to make the following appointments:

President                                Peter Bull

Vice-Presidents                     Will Whyte and Henry Cranfield

Secretary                               Will Whyte

Treasurer                               Alex Ebert

 Committee Members:        The above office bearers and

John Eades

Bob Emanuel      

Colin Kelly

Allan Hennessy

Bernie White

Ray Hookway

David Richardson

Auditors:                                Ken Theaker and Tony Farrugia.

Incoming President’s Remarks:

I thank you, the membership of the OTVA, for electing me to the position of President of the OTVA once again.  In accepting the presidency of the OTVA I recognise that your support is a reflection of the excellent work performed by the Committee of the OTVA throughout 2010/11 and welcome the challenges that will confront us in the next 12 months.

I congratulate Bernie White for his 12 years of dedication to the Committee and the membership of the OTVA. I thank him for the excellent job that he has done in managing finances of the OTVA in the face of the GFC and its flow on effects within the financial environment in Australia. He has left the OTVA in excellent financial position.

I welcome aboard Alex Ebert, son of Tony Ebert, who has accepted the roles and responsibilities of the Treasurer of the OTVA for the next 12 months. It would be most difficult for the OTVA to continue to operate without an efficient and effective Treasurer. I look forward to working him in this capacity for the next 12 months and thank him for accepting this role.

I congratulate the other members who have been nominated and accepted positions on the Executive for year 2010/11.

I look forward to working with this team over the next 12 months to meet the challenges and deliver satisfactory outcomes to the membership of the OTVA.

In the next 12 months the Executive will continue to improve the flow of information to you, the members of the OTVA, and we commit to listen to you in relation to what you want to see as benefits from being members of the OTVA

We, your Committee, require you the members of the OTVA to tell us how you want the OTVA to evolve and grow over the next few years and what vision you have for the 5 year plan for the OTVA. To this end we will continue to seek your input.

Once again thank you for this opportunity

General Business:             

1.  It was agreed to grant free membership and newsletters to any remaining female OTVA members.

2.  There was some discussion about the archival and artifact materials stored at the Bankstown Telstra Museum.  The President expressed his concern about the difficulties of keeping the Asset Register up-to-date.

3.  It was noted that the Centenary of Telecommunications will be celebrated in 2013. Strong interest was expressed in OTVA being involved in this event.  This matter will be discussed in more detail at committee meetings, in future editions of the newsletter and on the OTVA website blog.

4.  It was agreed that Vales would no longer be included in Newsletters.  The President requested members to send him any interesting photos of themselves or of OTC activities that could be used to build a historical album.

 5.  In order to reduce the workload associated with distribution of the Newsletters, it was agreed to utilize electronic transfer more effectively.  It was pointed out that the newsletters are already posted on the OTVA website.  The President invited all members who are willing to receive a soft copy of the newsletter to send him their e-mail address.

6.  A motion of appreciation was moved for the amount of work that Chris Bull puts into maintaining and improving the OTVA website.

 Meeting closed:                   The meeting closed at 12:30pm after which most members stayed for an informal lunch.

ISSN 1322-1906 June 2011. Volume 12 Page 31

President’s Message – 32
PNG Adventures – 33
The History Of Masers – 34
Dodgy Practices- Telco Vendors – 36
VALE – Ian Reed – 38

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Coming Events

2011 NSW AGM and June Reunion

WHEN: Friday 17th June 2011

WHERE: 2nd Floor the NSW Bowlers Club

TIME:   11 am Sharp.

RSVP to president@otva.com or call/SMS 0411 260 542 by Friday 3 rd June

Also indicate if you will join us for lunch on Level 1. Interstate Vets are more than welcome.

 Wednesday 15^th June 2011 at 12noon at Legacy House, 2^nd floor, 293 Swanston Street Melbourne.

R.S.V.P. to Robert Hall  03 95116969. Email   rjmdolphin@optusnet.com.au

 Mark these in your diary now! 

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The OTVA Newsletter REWARDS Program

 OTVA will pay a reward of $50 to members whose contribution to the Newsletter is judged by the Committee to be the best contribution. Alan Mason won last edition’s award.

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From Our President

Our NSW AGM will be held on Friday 17 June at 11am on Level 2 of the NSW Bowlers’ Club located at 99 York Street, Sydney. The AGM will be followed by lunch in the Bistro on Level 1 the cost of which will be approximately $25 payable to the cashier. RSVP by Friday 3 June 2011 to president@otva.com or SMS me on 0411 260 542 so that we can firm up the table booking. I look forward to catching up with you there.

Your Web Master, Chris Bull, continues to review options to improve the quality of the services offered to members via the OTVA web site (http://www.otva.com). I am sure that you all agree that the OTVA web site is operating very well although we, the members of the OTVA, do not maximise it’s benefits to us. We collectively have many memories and stories from our past experiences in OTC which will be lost forever if we do not seize this opportunity to preserve them for future generations. OTC was a great organisation but once we are gone so too goes the great history of the people and events which made OTC what it was. Use the BLOG pages to recall those stories and memories for yourself and your peers of that era in Australian communications history. Your entry may then trigger others to comment thereby preserving the memory of OTC for the future. You can access the BLOG site via the Home page of the OTVA web site. If your story is picked up by the Newsletter Editor and is selected as the ‘best article’ for that month, you may even win $50 for your efforts.

Your Newsletter Editor, Bob Emanuel, also seeks input from our membership on newsworthy articles that can be included in the Newsletter. Bob has advised that he does not have much content for upcoming Newsletters and, if that is still the case by the time that we go to print, your Executive may be forced to reduce the number of Newsletters to only 2 each year due to lack of suitable content. Don’t forget that there is a $50 award for the best article submitted for inclusion in each Newsletter.

Our long serving Treasurer, Bernie White has decided to hang up his calculator and retire from the position on which he served for about 12 years.  We are indebted to Bernie for his loyalty and dedication to the tasks and on behalf of all members take this opportunity to thank him for the way he has supported our association over such a long period.  We will be seeking nominations from the OTVA membership for the position of Treasurer at the AGM. Your Executive has reviewed the duties performed by the outgoing Treasurer to prune them to a minimal level as a means of assisting the new Treasurer to ‘ease’ into the role. Obviously the OTVA cannot continue to exist without a Treasurer.

Your Executive needs to be able to communicate with its membership and to enable effective communication we need your current email addresses. It is very time consuming and costly to distribute via Australia Post pamphlets, letters, newsletters, etc. Please take a few seconds the next time that you are checking your email or browsing the Internet to drop me an email via president@otva.com. You don’t have to include any message details if you don’t want to. I will simply check your email against the one that we have on file for you and in that way the Executive can maintain a current list of valid email addresses for its membership. The Executive will maintain the confidentiality and security of your email address and will not issue it to anyone without your express permission.

Your Executive also seeks the support of its membership to find someone with audio visual (AV) expertise who can either be co-opted into the Committee for a short period or who can offer instruction and/or advice to myself or other members of the team. Your Executive is considering using YouTube (or similar) to distribute videos of historical significance or communicate video messages to our membership. This may also benefit those members who cannot travel to the Bowlers Club to attend our regular social functions, AGM and Christmas get-together.

We are also building an album of photos of people that we can then use with stories, etc. to jog people’s memories by associating a name with a face.

Unfortunately several more of our ex-OTC brothers and/or their partners have departed this life since I last addressed you. I extend my sincere condolences to their many friends and family who are saddened by their passing but are gladdened by the fullness of their rich and long lives.

May They Rest In Peace.

Warmest regards,

Peter Bull

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Register and maintain your email address with president@otva.com to ensure you get news updates and special notices. Have you checked out our website of late? www.otva.com

With extra articles, more colour photos and more information than we can publish in this Newsletter. Have your recollections, stories and reminiscences recorded online for posterity. If you would like to contribute to the oral history of telecommunications, please contact Bob Emanuel on 0412 062 236. Content will be uploaded to our website.

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OTVA TREASURER.

Main Duties – Collect cash, make out receipts, compile financial information for the Committee and the AGM.

Financial Statements – Make out statements of income and expenditure and compile balance sheets for the committee and AGM. These must be audited

When possible attend committee meetings.

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PNG Adventures

 By Allan Mason

(Allan told us in the last Newsletter that he and his wife Josette spend some months each year in Papua New Guinea, Allan providing comms for Josette’s medical patrols -here is their latest update from the very west of PNG)

We are leaving camp Wakali in Middle Fly tomorrow and heading back to Kiunga, only today to run a clinic at the local village and then a few days R&R next week! This patrol has been quite tiring, probably because it a bit longer than usual, although we have enjoyed the home comforts, like flush loo’s, hot showers and good meals, and great logistics supplying our requests. It will be nice to get back to our home base in Kiunga and get P29CW on air again.

 Originally we had planned another patrol straight away, but have decided it’s too much and we are going to be in Kiunga for about 3 weeks. We will probably be bored by then, especially as the hospital no longer has an anaesthetist or any doctors, so Josette can’t do any surgery. However Josette will probably have to spend quite a bit of time there looking after their patients and helping the nursing staff with their problems.

We were planned to leave on Wednesday but there is only one flight this week, on Monday. We were booked on that, but today the camp manager said there is a helicopter going to Kiunga tomorrow so he has us planned to go on that instead. It will be a bit more interesting than the small plane, as they don’t fly so high and you can see more, although the country we will fly over is very flat and uniformly lots of jungle with a lot of water lying around.

We are very isolated down here, even more so than in Kiunga. Anything could be happening in the world and we would have no idea. We occasionally hear news on Radio Australia, but it’s often not very clear. In Kiunga one of the sister’s houses has satellite TV, as has the men’s house, so we occasionally go and watch the news. We saw some of the footage from the tsunami in Japan.  Also the men’s house gets the national PNG newspapers so there is a bit of international news in them. Of course when in Kiunga we talk on the radio to friends in Sydney, and occasional have a Skype conversation with some of you, so that’s nice. We don’t have any mobile reception here either, and the satellite phone here is blocked to outgoing calls!

The weather for the past few days has been quite dry, but also cloudy so it has not been too hot. Today is very bright and sunny, so could end up very warm. At least we don’t have to spend 4 hours in a small banana boat today, and get fried!! We are only working in the village next door, about 5 minutes walk from camp. It will probably rain again soon, and then the mud will come back. After rain, it gets more humid and sweaty.

We have put in a request for some large prawns to be caught tonight. The very large prawns live in the floating grass in the lakes and river. They will be delivered by a one legged man in a dugout canoe in the morning at the camp waterfront.

The big Chinook chopper is interesting to watch lifting heavy equipment and full shipping containers.  There are only 7 of these in commercial operation around the globe and three of those are working in PNG.

The rig starts drilling today for about 30 days and the camp staff have high expectations for gas and hopefully oil.  This is the third well in the area, a dry well was sunk in the 1950s, another in the 1990s that produced a water and some gas and, they think they will be lucky this time due the improved seismic data.

Best 73,

Allan and Josette

 

(Kiunga is a port town on the Fly River in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea,^[1] just upstream from the D’Albertis Junction with the Ok Tedi River. It is the southernmost terminus of the Kiunga-Tabubil Highway. Local industry rests on a cornerstone of freight and haulage, particularly from the Ok Tedi Mine and provisioning for the much larger town of Tabubil. Rubber has been an emerging industry more recently, with a processing/manufacturing plant being built in town) – Wikipedia. 

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The History of Masers

 By Cyril Vahtrick

Since I was responsible for the original installation of the first Ceduna Earth Station, I was very interested to read your information about the astronomical research being conducted at that facility. As you noted, the location of the original Earth Station at Ceduna was dictated by the need to access one of the Intelsat satellites located over the Indian Ocean in a position which provided coverage to the most westerly location at the UK Earth Station at Goonhilly Downs. This meant that the terrestrial distance covered by the satellite link was very close to the maximum for one satellite link. As I recall it, the original Indian Ocean Satellite was located at 62.5 degrees East longitude. To span this distance, each of the antenna angles was not too far from the 5 degree elevation angle recommended as the operational minimum by Intelsat.

Since most of the telecommunications traffic handled by Ceduna was relayed on to the Eastern States by Telecom at our cost, OTC sought to locate the principal overseas traffic stream at as far east as practicable to minimize the Telecom landline costs to the Eastern States. Eventually, significant reduction in the internal landline costs in Australia led to the re-location of satellite earth stations to Western Australia. This eventually led to Ceduna becoming redundant.

 Apart from that little bit of history, the main point of my writing is to talk about Masers.

Back in the late 1950’s, proponents of the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe postulated that some of the residual energy from the original radiations should have come down to microwave frequencies. As a result, radio astronomers set out to see if they could detect any such radiations.

An immediate problem was that the expected energy from these radiations as received on earth would be infinitesimal. Then a fortuitous situation arose. The successful launch of Sputnik in 1959, quickly produced a flood of experiments on the use of satellites to relay communications across oceans. The microwave frequencies then envisaged as being the best vehicle led to a common interest with the astronomers.

 When the communications entities in USA and Europe decided to spend significant money in developing high gain microwave antennas, they joined forces with the astronomers in the search of a super sensitive receiver amplifier to detect the very low level satellite signals which were originally expected.

 The AT&T Company in USA built a gigantic horn antenna with a 30 metre aperture in the remote outback of the North Eastern State of Maine. To minimize man-made electrical noise, this was located far from any residential or industrial activity.

 The UK Post Office built a  30 metre aperture traditional parabolic antenna at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall. France and Germany also built antennas.

 The USA launched the Telstar satellites which were the first successful experimental satellites to provide communications across the Atlantic. Other experimental satellites followed in other areas.

 There was an interesting device which was the principal ingredient in all the original earth stations. It was quickly recognized that the minute microwave signals being received would prove difficult to distinguish above the electronic noise generated just by electrons in molecules vibrating at ambient temperatures. To deal with this issue, the astronomers had come up with a device which operated at the temperature of liquid hydrogen (-266 degrees C), very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees C). This reduced the equipment electronic noise to a very small minimum. 

 The device which the astronomers had come up with used quantum theory to arrange the dislodgement of electrons from one orbit in a ruby crystal to an outer orbit, thus generating a release of radiation energy at a particular microwave frequency. The device was called by the acronym MASER – Microwave Amplification by the Stimulation of Emitted Radiation.

 Masers were used, (with synthetic rubies) on all the original experimental satellite earth stations in USA, UK, France and Germany.

 While liquid hydrogen could be readily produced, its use in cooling the Masers was far from practical, so by the time the first operational global communications satellite earth stations were commissioned (Carnarvon was one of these), an alternative low noise receiver had been developed. Carnarvon used a parametric amplifier which had to be cooled by liquid nitrogen which, at -196 degrees Celsius, was continuously produced by a cryogenic system. This was a new technology which OTC technicians had to come to terms with.

 As satellite technology developed, with such things as high power spot beams, the requirement of ultimate performance from earth station receivers was gradually reduced so that, these days, international television relays can be achieved by relatively simple transportable systems.

 I have an interesting final word on masers. In 1961 there was a top level British Commonwealth Telecommunications conference in Kuala Lumpur to put the final stamp on the SEACOM cable project. Some 150 delegates from Commonwealth countries attended and the conference lasted a couple of weeks.

The Institution of Engineers in Kuala Lumpur invited an eminent research scientist from the British Post Office to address them on technological developments in telecommunications. He talked about the future development of satellite communications and, during question time, he was asked what he thought about Lasers, which researchers had developed for amplification of light frequencies. His response was that “Lasers were a solution in search of a problem!”  How true!                                                                                                                                                                

 (Many thanks for this Cyril. Does anyone have anything to add?)

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Dodgy Telco Practices – The Vendor

 (This is a collection of stories from more than a dozen telco personnel based in every region of the world over the past 20 years. This story is one of Bob E’s from his days in Malaysia. These stories will fall into 3 groups – Telco Fraud, Dodgy Practices and Downright Deception).

 By Bob Emanuel

 Vendors can indulge in some very dodgy practices. Least Quality Software is a case in point – all telco vendors stress how excellent are their quality controls in writing software for their telephone exchanges – however, those in Telephony Operations and Engineering groups in the early 1990’s know well the value of such assertions.

So I was well armed when I headed off to help set up Time Telekom Sdn Bhd in Malaysia, the Optus of that country, as Switching Operations Manager. The main telephone switch was the NEAX 61ev, manufactured by the Japanese company NEC and provided by its local vendor Pernec.

These were solid, dependable local and trunk (STD) switches housed in two airtight and well air-conditioned shipping containers. Their switching database was a joy to populate and manipulate and their Man-Machine Interface (MMI) was excellent.

 Good stuff, said I in the Pernec lab as we tested our database in lab conditions as the real network was being rolled out around Malaysia. Pernec’s engineers were all well trained, reliable and customer friendly.

 Customer connections were connected to Remote Line Units, (RLU’s), scattered around the country connected back to the main switch centres in the capital cities of each state. The local loop was a minus 48 volt DC loop; there was little ISDN in the country at the time.

 NEC had repeatedly assured Time Telekom that these switches had been deployed in South America and were reliable.

 Come the great day and our first customers go live – we had more calls coming into our switches from misdialled numbers from other networks than we did for legitimate numbers – but the network proved reliable.

Our first monsoon season struck some months later and all hell broke loose!

Lightning strikes within a kilometre of one of the RLU’s would send that RLU into lah-lah land and it would have to be manually reset. The vendor blamed our earthing systems, but we had a couple of strong local loop engineers from the UK and the USA who swore black and blue that the earthing systems were bullet proof – and most were.

We ended up forming flying squads on their little motor scooters who were despatched to RLU sites prior to a storm hitting to do the manual resets whilst also forming a group together of our best techs and engineers to examine all earthing systems – and we found that unauthorised connections had been made to our earthing systems by building managers who knew a good earth when they saw one – that led to earth current loops and all manner of problems. The building manager issue alone took us a year to sort out properly.

 There was a suspected element of sabotage, too, when a week after we had made an RLU site bulletproof, it would revert to its former, faulty, configuration – physical wires were reconfigured.

 Having finally made all RLU earthing systems bulletproof, which also meant making all of the main building earths bullet proof wherever we had an RLU site – that cost us a pretty penny, too – we were still having problems with lightning strikes shooting our RLU’s into lah-lah land.

 The telecommunications equipment life cycle is long and complex, or is supposed to be. After the initial market research, the design and prototyping in vendor labs, comes the customer rollout phase, in four parts –

• customer testing in the labs,
• an alpha trial where a few customers are connected to the new equipment in a very controlled manner and closely monitored,
• the beta trial where many customers are connected but still in  a very controlled and closely monitored manner and
• the full release as an operational model with only Operations and Maintenance monitoring.

 Pernec could not resolve the problem. They were as perplexed as we were in Time.  Then it struck me – our NEAX61ev switches were an alpha trial model, and the rest of the company agreed!

 The internet was new then, but take-up in Malaysia and the product offering was far more advanced than in Australia. I researched what I could and found that whereas the NEAX61 switch had been deployed successfully around the world, the NEAX61ev switch had only ever been deployed in Malaysia, in our company.

 I approached the Pernec MD, with the full support of my CEO/COO, and suggested to him that we send a letter to him thanking him for all the work that Pernec had done for us in resolving this matter, but that it seemed to me Time Telekom was the alpha trial site for these switches, and that perhaps he could suggest that NEC should send some of their engineers down to Malaysia to fix it. He sent that letter off to NEC in Tokyo.

 Ten days later, their Senior Vice- President of Switching Products is bowing and formally apologising to me and my colleagues in a very formal meeting at Pernec HQ. He admitted that Time Telekom was the alpha trial site and apologised profusely – it was done because of the timelines imposed by Time.

 The Pernec MD and I found it difficult to control our laughter, but we did, thanked him for his apology, wished he and his team well in resolving the issues and broke up into helpless laughter in his office afterwards.

 NEC had ten of their Japanese design engineers and ten of the Pernec engineers as their understudies go around the country, fixing each and every fault, turning Time Telekom into a full release network in a matter of weeks.

Had they been upfront in the first place, I don’t think I would have been involved in one of the funniest incidents in my professional life. Proof that dodgy practices don’t pay!

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 VALE

 Ian Kenneth Reed – 17.6.1943 – 21.4.2011

From Robert Hall

 Ian commenced with O.T.C. (A) on the 12.1.1959 as a Traffic Assistant Grade 1. In the M.O.R.  then located at 167 Queen Street Melbourne. Ian’s commencing salary at that time was 360 pounds per annum and his education standard on leaving school was the Technical School Intermediate Certificate. Ian was living in East Ringwood and would have travelled by train to Flinders Street Station. Late in 1960 O.T.C. moved to 382 Lonsdale Street where Ian progressed through the ranks to I.T.O./S.I.T.O.  then transferred to the Commercial/Marketing Branch in Melbourne.

Whilst in OTC’s Commercial branch Ian had the opportunity to advance his career and early in the 1970’s Ian & Janet & family moved to O.T.C. Sydney for 2 to 3 years (a big step in those days), then came back to Melbourne as a Senior Commercial officer.

During the following years Ian’s long experience and knowledge of International Telecommunications, saw him travel extensively Interstate & overseas on business trips and acquire a business degree at University.

Ian’s remaining years in OTC, were as a senior sales executive in OTC Sales & Marketing in charge of key OTC corporate accounts. Along with other work colleagues Ian was transferred to Telstra International Sales until he retired in early 2000’s

Back in the early 1960’s Ian met and married Janet who worked with my wife Judith and myself in OTC Melbourne accounts branch on the 4^th floor. We attended each other’s weddings and Judith and I stayed with Ian & Janet with our families for a week at their home in Sydney in the mid 70’s.

Ian was a member of the OTVA and served for a number of years as an Honorary Auditor. In the 60/70’s Ian was active in a number of OTC sporting events organised by the OTC Sports and Social Club, and attended a several Wagga weekends.

Ian was very much admired by his work colleagues for his long experience and knowledge of the Telecommunications market. He was a smart business thinker, very aware of commercial issues and customers, even tempered and rarely rattled by the daily pressures of work life.

He treated everyone with respect, from senior managers to junior support staff with the same dignity and amiable style he was renowned for. Over the years Ian remained in contact with work colleagues from his former years in OTC right up until his retirement and was always open to sharing a beer or two at his favourite watering hole.

I am very proud to say I was a good friend and work colleague of Ian and our deepest sympathy to Janet, Andrew, Christopher & Elizabeth. He will be deeply missed by us all.                                            

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