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North_Bend-Nebraska
Photos of the North Bend Nebraska site by Jim Hebbeln.

NBend-NE-N The camera is aimed due south. Note the AT&T cable Right Of Way warning sign (but I didn't record what kind of cable. Sorry.)
NBend-NE-NE-1 This is the view looking from northeast to southwest. (The soy beans look pretty good.) The horns on top of the shorter tower are the
NBend-NE-NNE Another view from north-northeast.
NBend-NE-S-1 The camera is looking north and shows how the equipment building is built into the hillside with the towers on the far north side.
NBend-NE-S-2 The camera is looking north and shows how the equipment building is built into the hillside with the towers on the far north side.
NBend-NE-SE This picture of North Bend, NE shows the width of the concrete equipment building, and also the original white house, which is now a garage.

This album has 6 items in total    |    Album was updated 9/6/04 7:00 PM 


Info:
August 03, 2004

North Bend, NE is one of AT&T's original 125 microwave radio relay towers which provided coast-to-coast network television service in 1951. North Bend is located about 4 miles north and 3.5 miles west of the town of North Bend, NE, and about 50 miles west-northwest (WNW) of Omaha.

It is now owned by American Tower Corporation and it is their Site #88992. According to their Landmark Series tower spreadsheet from their website, the North Bend towers are 141' and 283' tall.

Considerable growth occurred over the years at North Bend. Originally, it was only an auxiliary station providing links between Arlington, NE to the southeast, and Columbus, NE to the west. Although the original little white equipment house still stands with the original tower just to the west, it is dwarfed by a newer, large, two-story concrete equipment building half-buried in the hillside. The new building appears large enough to easily accommodate the transmission equipment needed to "switch" (demultiplex, re-arrange, and remultiplex) Groups (of 12 voice circuits), Super Groups (5 Groups), and Master Groups (10 Super Groups) from one radio route to another.

North Bend became a junction when a third "short cut" route was established eastward to the Elk Horn, IA junction which is also part of the transcontinental microwave route. This probably was done for Cold War reasons: If Omaha was nuked by the USSR, the transcon route could still be operational through the short cut. It also may have left spare growth capacity into Omaha. (A similar "short cut" was made around Denver - from Prospect Valley to Buckhorn Mountain.)

Later, another route to the northwest was established by erecting a second, much taller tower west of the original. This may have provided a short hop north to connect into the L-4 hardened coax cable route which traversed westward through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and west. Although, per Terry Michael's text about Lyons, NE (see http://long-lines.net/places-routes/Lyons_NE/index.html ) there is also a spur L-4 route from Lyons to North Bend.

I would guess that the building also had room to house one of the many #1 ESS 4-wire AUTOVON switching systems for the military. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) is just down river near Omaha. (ESS is Electronic Switching System; AUTOVON is the AUTOmatic VOice Network for military use.

A short AUTOVON tutorial: The 4-wire AUTOVON could switch calls using non-standard call routing methods to Alternate Route around otherwise normally used switching systems that may have been destroyed. By using 4-wire connections (with separate transmit and receive pairs of wires) to specialized telephone sets, the echo path that exists on commercial 2-wire phone lines is eliminated (but the phone line cost is doubled). So, despite the bizarre, long-propagation-time route a call might take through the remaining AUTOVON switches, the talkers won't hear echoes. (An echo with greater than 2-3 tenths second delay can easily and totally befuddle a talker who is interrupted by their own voice. Some of the early Voice over IP (VOIP) systems had ugly problems with this phenomena. Some still do on overloaded/high-latency Internet routes.)

The AUTOVON switches also had the Precedence and Preemption feature. If all trunk circuits to another AUTOVON switch were in use (and they often were), an important person (General, Admiral, President) could raise the Precedence of their call and preemptively disconnect an existing call - if all trunks were in use to a certain destination. There were five levels of preemption: Routine, Priority [P], Immediate [I], Flash [F], and Flash Override [FO] - listed from lowest to highest priority. The four [P] [I] [F] and [FO] keys were just another column of buttons on the right side of a Touch-Tone dial. The users would dial the preemption button followed by the called AUTOVON phone number. If you were on a call of lower priority, you could be "bumped" after hearing a Preemption Warning Tone. The General then got to use the trunk you were using to concur with launching an offensive (or schedule his tee-off time at the base to which he was planning to visit).

The Routine, Priority, Immediate, Flash, and Flash Override terms were also applied to the AUTODIN (Automatic Data Network) messages and are still incorporated in the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet that we all use today.