Spring 2007 Issue

Full view of the 10-story Jamesburg Earth Station Dish. (Photo by Gerald Moseley)

Jamesburg Earth Station on EME

Nearly 40 years ago the Jamesburg Earth Station was built for the purpose of providing reliable satellite communications, as well as support for the U.S. mission to the Moon. While some of the station seems to have outlived its usefulness, AA6EG has envisioned new uses for the old dish.

By Pat Barthelow, AA6EG

A few years back, I came across a story in the Carmel Pine Cone, the local newspaper of the quaint, small, expensive town of Carmel, on the Monterey Peninsula, on the central California coast. The article featured a photograph of the old AT&T/Jamesburg/COMSAT Earth station and a story about it, with the complete 160-acre parcel, being put up for sale by AT&T. AT&T now does with fiber optics what it used to do with the big, worldwide Earth station network, so it decided to sell some of its Earth stations. In fact, most original Earth stations have become dormant, and in some cases been dismantled, in recent decades. The 30-meter dishes are no longer necessary for solid satellite communications, although they might be put to use for other deeper space communications pursuits. There are a number of large dishes waiting for hams or others to apply the TLC and money to bring them back to useful life.
I thought, what a wonderful opportunity for someone to purchase the Jamesburg station, but I also thought that most likely the 30-meter dish would then be demolished. Here was an opportunity to approach the new owner to see if, after purchase and before disposition of the dish, perhaps some ham radio operators could work on the dish, bringing it back to life for moon-bounce communications.

Using public information sources, I learned that the entire 160-acre AT&T parcel was purchased for $1.75 million and by whom. I contacted the new owner and his representatives. The owner is a Silicon Valley businessman who appeared to want the property for a “country home” and had no particular interest in the dish. In fact, at the time he thought of it as more of a liability than an asset in his property development plans.

A Plan

I contacted a long-time ham friend, Dave Smith, W6TE, an avid and well-equipped moon-bounce operator, and told him the news. We immediately thought about how to make an offer to the owner to allow us to commission the dish for EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) operations. For a while it seemed that the owner was not interested, except maybe for the publicity that would be generated by our EME activity.

At about the same time I was working on a terrestrial microwave community-service project with Cal State, Monterey Bay, and was active in WETEC 2005, a conference at the university covering various student and faculty wireless-technology projects with professional and student papers submitted. I arranged for a tour of Jamesburg during the conference. Susan Irwin, CEO of Irwin Communications, and well known in the satellite communications industry, among others, came out, and we immediately brainstormed at the site to find a future for the dish. After careful deliberations by some of the best people in the satcom business, it was determined that there were probably few to no viable business models for use of the dish in the industry.

Click here to return to Spring 2007 highlights

Click here to subscribe to VHF

_________________

© Copyright 2007, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.