AT&T Long Lines Tower near Reedsville WV

This used to be an AT&T Long Lines tower up until probably the mid 90's or so. You can still see a faint Bell logo painted on the front of the building, to the right of the door. Originally it would have had a set of Western Electric or Gabriel horn antennas like the ones seen on the tower at Alexander WV, but at some point, probably in the 80's they were replaced with these 15' Andrew dishes. You can still see the mounting for the horns at the top of the tower, as well as the mounting for the WC 281 circular waveguide going up the outside of the tower. I'm not sure why the horns were replaced, because I don't think a 15' dish really offers any performance advantage over a horn of the same size. It could have originally had smaller horns, or maybe the horns were damaged and replacement parts weren't available.

One interesting difference between this tower and most other semi-modern towers you'll see with dishes, is that although there are short runs of elliptical waveguide out of the shelter, the run up the tower goes through a circular waveguide, which I think is WC 175. With an inside diameter of 44 mm, it's much smaller than the 71 mm WC 281 waveguide used with the original horns. It's weird because you'll pretty much never see any kind of circular waveguide on a new tower.

The Western end of this hop goes to a tower outside of an old C&P central office that still has its original horn antennas, about 6 miles away off of US-119 South of Morgantown, and from there on into Morgantown. I haven't located the Northern end of this hop yet, but it goes over Masontown in the direction of Snake Hill in Coopers Rock State Forest.

As usual, there are no active antennas on this tower and the equipment shelter is empty.

If you have any more information on this site please feel free to let me know.

Map Coordinates

39.478966° W 79.805980 ° N

Street Address

1424 Dogtown Rd
Reedsville, WV

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