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Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, Former AT&T High Seas Transmitter Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009.
(fedia.io)
Shortwave "Discone" Antenna, Former AT&T High Seas Transmitter Site, Ocean Gate, NJ, 2009.
All the pixels, none of the seasickness, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4141766569
#photography
There were three AT&T radiotelephone sites in the continental US, each with its own transmit and receive antenna farms: Ocean Gate, NJ (shown here, serving the North Atlantic), Miami (serving the Caribbean and the Gulf), and Point Reyes, CA (serving the Pacific).
All the sites have by now been razed, either for redevelopment or as nature preserves. The antennas (including this one) are mostly gone now.
Ships on the high seas still occasionally make some use of shortwave radio, but its importance has greatly diminished over the last few decades. The Coast Guard still maintains a "watch" on emergency shortwave frequencies, listening for distress calls, but most transoceanic ships are now equipped with more modern, higher-bandwidth satellite communications systems.
Places like this are what the Internet looked like a century ago. Infrastructure is often heroic, and occasionally looks the part.
I should note that while the site (and its cousins) had a number of large discone antennas like this one, they were mostly there as backups in case the main antennas (which included truly massive wire rhombics oriented toward various oceanic regions) or transmitter combiners failed.
The old Bell System did not mess around.
@[email protected] that’s very cool, thanks for sharing!