The AT&T earth station was located at the Point Reyes coastal radio station (callsign KPH). Over the years, the facility was owned by Marconi, RCA, GE, AT&T and MCI. Decommissioned in 1997, it is now an historical site within the Point Reyes National Seashore. In 1913, an American Marconi Company transmitting station was established at Bolinas. The receiving station KPH was about twenty miles further north, at Point Reyes (the separation was to reduce noise from the outgoing transmissions interfering with the weak in-bound transmissions). In 1914, the stations at Bolinas and Marshall would allow messages received from New Brunswick, New Jersey to be retransmitted to Hawaii. KPH has been preserved by volunteer members of the Maritime Radio Historical Society and is operated at weekends and on special occasions such as International Marconi Day and the anniversary of the "end of commercial Morse code in America." The station volunteers also use the alternative call sign KSM and amateur radio club callsign K6KPH.
The station is on the N side of the road from Inverness to the Point Reyes lighthouse and is reached by a side road lined with Monterey cypress trees. AT&T has long vacated the station and only the mount of the earth station dish antenna remains. This earth station was the initial communication link with Beijing that provided network access between the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing starting in 1991, and provided the base for the first permanent link from mainland China to the Internet that went live in 1994..
Entrance lined with Monterey cypresses with museum at the end | Les by mount of old earth station, May 19, 2012 | Ancient Teletype, still working | Les with Ranger in communication toom |
|---|---|---|---|
| | | |
