What was it- TRS or UAX?

[Oldcodger]

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5365...7i13312!8i6656

Sited on the A5 , just south of the Long shoot hotel on the A5 /A47 junction, not far from the Aldi store ,it sits neglected and with only a bit of grafiti , alone in the trees.
Personally I'd suggest its an old Repeater station from it's location .
But does anyone know anything better, or know it's history ?

[bc312]

My directory shows it as Long Shoot coaxial hut (no A1141 code shown) - unattended, and managed from Coventry Central exchange/TRS. I'm guessing long redundant surface repeater/power feed for CEL 6A. No idea of the route however.

Mike

[Hartley118]

That building has the familiar style of a Post Office Telephones repeater station. I remember as a temporary GPO trainee visiting several such repeaters on the then innovative Doncaster to Cambridge coaxial cable. ISTR it had a bandwidth of some 1MHz and was pressurised with compressed air to keep out the wet. The problem was that the cable leaked, so it was necessary to change out the compressed air cylinders from time to time. Whilst changing the cylinder, I remember having a brief opportunity to study the rack of (all valve) repeater amplifiers.

With careful observation, the series of distinctive repeater stations could be spotted along the A1 and A14, though many are disappearing due to recent road widening.

Martin

[Tim]

I was given a job file for work at Lorresbridge repeaters(near Gloucester) the title of which was "Remove dead mouse from power room floor"
The poor thing was mummified by the time I got there, and came up all in one piece, as it were, with gentle encouragement from a pair of 81's.

[Graham G3ZVT]

So, someone discovered the rodent, but felt they weren't qualified to deal with it themselves?

[Herald1360]

Maybe they didn't have the requisite pair of 81s to hand so as not actually to touch the mouldering rodent.

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by Hartley118

With careful observation, the series of distinctive repeater stations could be spotted along the A1 and A14, though many are disappearing due to recent road widening.

Likewise up the A6 and eastwards along the A69. One near Hadrian's Wall has been turned into accommodation: 'The Old Repeater Station'. Another on Shap Fell is a bothy and was used for the odd musical gig!

Quite a few have simply been abandoned, doors open, BT having simply walked away.

[Oldcodger]

REF #3 - From it's location on the A5 ,and proximity to both Hinckley and Nuneaton, I'd suggest that it was not an old UAX style building. This design was used for UAX and surface repeaters up to CEL6,which had a bandwidth of 4MHZ. The cables did leak a bit ,but let's not forget that several stations were powerfed at 1kv over the coax and 1kv and a bit of damp do not get on well together.

[AC/HL]

Although I was Mercury, not BT, I did hear an anecdote regarding these line systems. Called out to a line fault, the engineers found the cable damaged with an unattended hacksaw embedded in it. 1Kv and cable thieves don't mix either!

[Oldcodger]

AC- Love that one. Rail systems use a similar system. 650 V AC is fed from lineside box to next to supply signalling equipment. Press headline was of persons being taken to hospital after suffering burns from an attempt to cut into a 650v cable. Dish of day was fried cable nicker.
Mercury- thought that they used fibre down track side. or so I was told, when systems went down. My first comeback into comms was on smart box commissioning and maintenance. And ( in mode of murder mystery ) , most faults were down to BT Engineer in the coms room with the smartbox power switch)

[AC/HL]

They were fibre, but that didn't stop chancers nicking the cable from the open concrete troughs. We'd find it discarded once they realised. Easy call out money though!

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by AC/HL

They were fibre, but that didn't stop chancers nicking the cable from the open concrete troughs. We'd find it discarded once they realised. Easy call out money though!

Yes, more than once in the early-90s I had sites go offline only to be told by Mercury that 'some thieving scrotes have ripped-out the fibre thinking it was copper'.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by Oldcodger

My first comeback into comms was on smart box commissioning and maintenance. And ( in mode of murder mystery ) , most faults were down to BT Engineer in the coms room with the smartbox power switch)

During that era I was working for a third-party maintainer with fingers in BT and all of the alternative carriers' pies.

I would turn up at a site, practically cold calling, and try to convince the manager that the Mitel SMarT-1 I had with me would save him a packet if he let me install it.

Perhaps it did.

If the their phone system supported LCR, I would programme it accordingly instead.


But then, six months later I might me knocking on his door again, this time asking if I can cut back over to BT, where a better deal was to be had.

I was under a fair amount of pressure to succeed, and I didn't feel at all comfortable in the role.

[Test Desk]

As a BT engineer, one of my customers had Mercury LCR installed and on multiple occasions I proved a "no dial tone" into their kit only to have the customer report that MCL found no fault but on my retest all was magically working again.
They seemed to operate a "we don't have faults" policy which undermined my status as a competent engineer.

[Station X]

Back on topic please.

[duncanlowe]

In spite of living just 'down the road' for most of my childhood, and still visiting the area often, I'd never spotted that! It's an odd place for anything directly to do with subscribers phones. Nuneaton exchange was (is?) in the centre of town, and Hinckley is a separate place and dialling code. Although Nuneaton shares it's dialling code with Coventry that wasn't always the case. This, being on the outskirts of both, properly on the edge of Nuneaton and Hinckley, I'd have to say (given my complete lack of knowledge of the wider systems) that it's part of some wider interconnection system.

[russell_w_b]

I thought these little buildings were just intermediate repeater stations, located aprox. five miles apart on trunk routes? Here's one in mid-Cumbria that BT have stripped and abandoned. It was advertised as 'for sale' a couple of years ago.

[Oldcodger]

duncan- I'd agree ,living locally.
russel- Up to five miles was the spec distance for CEL6 surface stations ( from memory and other GPO/PO transmission bloke might confirm).
But GPO/PO use the same building style for both UAX (5/..12/13/) and TRS , so it's difficult to tell one from the other. A prime example is sited on the shores of Loch Lochy ( from memory close to Letterfinlay) where a UAX and a TRS shared the same site close to each other, and close by- a raspberry bush, laden with large berries.

[Hartley118]

I guess I'm not alone in being fazed by TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)

TRS?.........telephone repeater station?
UAX?
CEL?

Martin

[Pellseinydd]

Originally Posted by Oldcodger

duncan- I'd agree ,living locally.
russel- Up to five miles was the spec distance for CEL6 surface stations ( from memory and other GPO/PO transmission bloke might confirm).
But GPO/PO use the same building style for both UAX (5/..12/13/) and TRS , so it's difficult to tell one from the other. A prime example is sited on the shores of Loch Lochy ( from memory close to Letterfinlay) where a UAX and a TRS shared the same site close to each other, and close by- a raspberry bush, laden with large berries.

Slight correction. The UAX5 building was known as an 'A' type and would only in its initial form house a UAX5 four 2ft wide units in a single suite plus a wall mounted MDF plus the batteries. The original UAX5 exchange buildings had a flat topped thick concrete roof - see photo of Hampton in Cheshire when in use. Later the UAX12 with up to four units plus the enclosed MDF unit was fitted into the same building. When a UAX 12 was increased in size to a UAX12X by adding another five units, the building would be extended away from the road. A UAX13 required at least two suites of racks -MDF rack and switching racks in one suite and the relay sets etc in a second parallel suite. The original building used for the UAX13 was a wider one known initially as a 'B' Type with a four pitched roof - this is the former Buckley exchange in North Wales with a later B2 type to the rear linked with a corridor! But a slightly wider version was introduced as UAX13's got larger and needed three suites known as a Type B1 . In later years (early 1950's) wooden A, B and B1 buildings were introduced. Very occasionally a UAX13 was installed in a single suite in an extended A type building - there was only the height for a single suite of 8ft 6in high UAX13 racks in an A type!. See photo of Rhandirmwyn in Mid-Wales. Originally a UAX12 it was converted to be a UAX13R - a reduced height version of a UAX13 with feet taken off the UAX13 racks to reduce the height and used UAX12 STD racks which are only 2 metres or so high.

At Loganswell between Glasgow and Kilmarnock on the A77 is the former Loganswell UAX12 (later UAX13R) in a 'A' type building with a TRS right next to it. UAX12 on the right - now disused since a 'certain person' found the old Loganswell exchange out of use but not recovered as a new larger repeater station/exchange building had been built to replace both and hence no need to recover the exchange for space for its digital replacement. Hence exchange headed for North Wales in the mid/late 1990's. Note the slightly different pattern buildings - 'A' type on the right and the 'TRS' type on the left.