There are a bunch of these still standing in West Virginia, and I'm currently working to photograph the entire route from Charleston to Morgantown and the AT&T International Earth Station in Preston county. The cool thing about living in West Virginia is that once something is built, it pretty much never gets taken down because no one cares. In the case of these towers, they were sold by AT&T when they decommissioned their terrestrial microwave network, probably some time in the early 2000's, and are currently owned by American Tower, which leases space on towers to wireless service providers like cell carriers, which ironically now includes AT&T. Most of these towers are in the middle of nowhere, so they still have all of the original stuff and no active antennas.

You'll notice that these towers are built extremely well, with heavy gauge crossmembers and a massive concrete foundation, because AT&T did not mess around. A notable difference from modern towers is that they have four legs instead of the usual three, and now that I think about it these might actually be modified electric pylons.

There are two different types of horn antennas you'll see on these towers. The ones pictured above were actually made by Western Electric and are called "Hogg" horns after the guy that invented them. They're basically an aluminum pyramidal horn antenna capped with a curved reflector. The keystone shaped aperture is covered with a fabric radome to keep out weather and debris. The wire grid above them isn't part of the antenna, it's a shield to keep pieces of ice falling off the tower from hitting the antennas.

The other type, pictured at right, is a conical horn capped with a parabolic reflector, manufactured by Gabriel Electronics, which is still around and still makes great microwave antennas. Unlike the Hogg horns, these have a circular aperture, but still feature a fabric radome to keep out debris and weather. I don't know which is older, but if I have to guess I would say it's the Western Electric horns, which probably date back to the 50's.

Both types are capable of transmitting both horizontal and vertical polarizations at the same time, but use a unique feed system totally different from what is in common use today. Modern microwave systems use flexible elliptical waveguide, basically a hollow corrugated thin-wall copper tube, for the run up the tower. Elliptical waveguide can only carry one polarity, so two runs are needed for a dual polarization dish, which are combined at the feedhorn of the dish. Both the Gabriel and Hogg horn antennas accept massive, rigid, solid-copper-walled WC 281 circular waveguide which has a 71 mm (2.8") inside diameter with 1/8" thick walls, and can carry both polarities at the same time. At the base of the tower a complicated stack of filters, connectors, couplers, and adapters combined multiple frequencies and polarities for the run up the stack. When they were first installed they probably had rigid rectangular WR 229 waveguide from the indoor radios out to the bottom of the circular waveguide stacks for operation at 4 GHz, but were later modified with WR 159 waveguide for operation at 6 GHz.

As for why so many of these things are still around, it mostly has to do with size. That railing on the first picture is about four feet high and looks tiny next to that antenna. Each one of these is about 15-20 feet high and weighs as much as a small car. Removing something that size is almost as expensive as putting it up there in the first place.

Site History and Paths

There are two sets of antennas on this tower. The Hogg antennas are mounted about halfway up. According to the incomplete and expired FCC license I found for this site, the lower set of antennas is pointed at a Bell System central office near Clarksburg WV (Wolf Summit, call sign KQG37) about 36 miles away. Some time late in the service life of this tower a 12' Andrew dish antenna was mounted below the Hogg antennas, which I think it replaced. It has a separate pair of elliptical waveguide runs down the tower.
The two Gabriel antennas mounted at the top of the tower are pointed South, with the South end of this link being another tower on Point Mountain Road near Woodzell, WV (Webster Springs, call sign KQG39) about 20 miles away.
If you go by the license, it looks like it was carrying some traffic up until 2005, with six, probably 20 MHz wide, channels. As for the data rate, there probably wasn't one, since as far as I know this system used frequency modulated analog TDM. I don't know what radios it used, but the Starpoint radio manufactured by Motorola from 1984 could carry 600 voice circuits on each channel, which would give this station a capacity of 3,600 voice channels. Theoretically, that's equivalent to 225 Mb/S or 1½ OC3s. The 75dBm EIRP minus the approximately 45dB gain of the antennas means the transmitter produced one watt.

Map Coordinates

38.790093° W 80.258196° N

Street Address

8774 Alexander Rd
Frech Creek, WV

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