5963 computer grade dual triode production dates 3499

Davidson)

Total nightmare. Hams that like old Collins gear wouldn't be Collins fans much longer if they only saw what Collins built for commercial microwave. It was a total disaster.

I read about it in the "Demodulator!"

Pacific Telephone, for reasons unknown, installed a lot of "ON" carrier in California in mid '50s, supposedly to allow remaining non-carrier open wire routes to be utilized for short haul carrier purposes. Meanwhile, the outside plant people were replacing open wire are a fast rate with 19 ga toll cable. ON would work on either open wire or cable, and would yield 16 channels instead of the usual 12 that N-CXR would, so the bean counters evidently liked it. Type O was very rare out here, since there wasn't much left of the ancient intercity non-carrier open wire to put it on. Texas and some parts of the Midwest (Southwestern Bell) was O-CXR heaven. Both were interesting in that they used a single carrier for two channels, one on each sideband, similar to the "AM stereo" experiment tried in the '60s in broadcasting. In fact, O and ON-CXR is where the guy got the idea.

A last holdout for O-CXR must've been the Churchill County Telephone System, a county government owned telecom in the Nevada county of the same name, which now calls itself "CC Communications." 6 or 7 crossarms of exchange open wire linked Fallon and Fernley, NV, with O-CXR on a lot of it until around 2002. Although Nevada Bell, United-Sprint-Centel and others have tried to wrest that area away from its taxpayers since the '50s, the vote fails every time, and they enjoy some of the lowest telephone rates in the nation. CC Communications now is in the ISP business, probably the only publicly available taxpayer owned ISP around. There's an obvious synergy there, since the county doesn't have to build and operate its own communications network as do others...they already own the phone company!

dB