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Comment by djschnei | Hacker News Reader

Reading this from inside the old Bell Labs facility (now Bell Works) in Holmdel, NJ. Very cool to see

Wonder how the old 'Horn Antenna' on nearby Telegraph Hill is doing? Years ago, got a retired Bell Labs physicist named Dieter Marcuse to give me a walk-around tour of the thing. Now it's a National Monument but then it was viewed by engineers as a relic.

Modern wireless ISP equipment vendors have revived the horn antenna, in much smaller versions, for point to point and point-to-multipoint 5.x GHz applications:

https://rfelements.com/products/wireless-broadband/ultrahorn...

Much better sidelobe rejection and front/back ratio performance than traditional parabolics. What's old is new again.

I know you're talking about the Holmdel Horn (steerable) used for earlier transatlantic satellite relay experiments. But there are still a great many sites across the USA with 6 GHz horns in place on towers, mostly doing nothing.

I have seen tower crews with cutting torches cutting up KS-15676 horn antennas because they're too big and bulky to economically get off a tower any other way.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=KS-...

Thanks for the links. It's sort of sad when, knowing how much precision work went into assembling and installing one of those old KS15667s, you then watch them being unceremoniously demolished with blow torches.

Wonder if a some point it may be possible to synthesize a compact, ultra wide-band, minimal side loops ultrahorn for HF. Focused 24dBd signals on 20 meters without the need for a yagi antenna farm would be nice.

I've seen some of the press materials about commercial real estate agencies repurposing the facility. How much of the space is still empty?

Oh crap. If there isn't already a hackerspace in part of it, I might need to move to New Jersey...

I've been to the region, but not to the specific site. It's really out in the suburbs, so hope you like driving a lot and everything being very spread out.

Surprisingly there are not the best choices and prices/competition for serious ISP connectivity in the building, for dedicated 1/10GbE business class IP transit with carriers that I would consider in the "top ten" list for transit providers. At least not compared to some places in/near Seattle, somewhere close to Infomart Dallas, or the suburban sprawl around Ashburn, VA.

I don't think there is, but there could be one hiding somewhere haha. Just recently started here and it's 2 million sqft :D

I don't know the official numbers, but just from looking around I'd say space is about 50% filled. They do have a lot of construction going on so lease numbers might be higher. It is a very cool office space

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