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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but was there ever some form of fibre or telephony connection for news crews in 1990s? Microwave trucks excluded.

I ask this because I swear, as a kid, I’ve seen a cameramen open up a telecom/telephone box and connect something to it. I assumed it was for an uplink back to the station to transmit video.

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Absolutely. From the advent of radio broadcasting telephone lines were used for everything, audio and even DC signalling to control relays. All remote radio broadcasts used at least two lines. One for sending sound back to the station and a 2nd pair (telephone lines are a balanced pair of wires) for "cue" that came from the master control room to the remote site.

Since most transmitters were located outside of city limits, equalized telephone lines were used to send the sound from master control to the transmitter.

This was the most common and cheapest way to make the connection to the transmitter until the advent of inexpensive microwave equipment. And microwave links have a nasty habit of fading out during tropospheric inversions so they were actually not as reliable, over long distances, as a phone line with a backup phone line that took an alternate path. (first hand experience here. Ya I'm that old) :-)

Most people today have no idea how you transmit analogue audio faithfully and reliably over long distances, via wires. Telephone engineers figured it out over 100 years ago.

they would have had the operator reverse the charges I assume?

by the way the old bell system technical journals are a fun read and are generally available at places like archive.org

These were called "leased" lines. You ordered them and the Telco set them up for you and billed you like any other service.

The internet began on leased lines.

You mention two telephony lines were used for comms between station and site. Was the quality of audio for remote broadcasts better than a typical phone call?

Yes. The audio quality of land line phones was dictated primarily by transducers. This was by design. The TIA published specs for USA, Canada had their own as well as most other countries.

The response of a twisted pair was pretty good over 2 to 4 miles as I recall but for a audio grade (50Hz to 5000Hz) various techniques were used that at the simplest involved coils but there were also active equalizers available for long haul circuits and/or "hi-fi" requirements. Remember DSL lines were/are shipping 1..2Mhz carriers over those same old telco lines. :-)

Of course some old trunk lines used paper insulation. Really. Which meant noise went up ... when it rained.

Specially-conditioned circuits for broadcast audio were available at a price. These were point-to-point links, not on the PSTN. Network TV was sent over Bell System transcontinental coaxial cables before it went via satellite or fiber.

This is also how live radio broadcasts were made. I'm old enough to have been a part of shows performed at the West End, mixed across the street in the studio, and broadcast from the World Trade Center downtown.

I know ISDN was used for this kind of thing for a good while.

Yes, ISDN was the higher priced product offered by the telcos but ISDN was not available until the 1980s. Radio broadcasting started over 60 years earlier and analogue lines were the only option.

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