After Action Report: First Active AlbertaMTCwire Link

Saturday August 12, 2023 marks an historic day for Landline Telegraphy in Alberta!

As part of the AlbertaMTC Line project a demonstration of the first long distance link between two museums with telegraph displays was inaugurated at 11:00 AM MDT with the simple message:

"WHAT AN HISTORIC DAY"

First Message!

The message was sent 35 km (22 mi) between the station in Champion Park South of Calgary and the landline telegraph network at Heritage Park in Calgary that links the Midnapore and Laggan stations. 

The Champion Park Telegraphers
Marilyn Maguire, Mia Salomakhin
Kevin Jepson

 The link culminates a summer of active landline experimentation and practice by members of the Calgary chapter (CG) of the Morse Telegraph club and the Heritage Park Morse Telegraph Club that started with our display at Supertrain back in April of this year.

The link utilized two of Chip Morgan's interfaces connected to small laptops hidden beneath the desks in the stations at Midnapore and Champion. The laptops running MorseKOB connected across the Internet to Wire 11 (the traditional chat wire) on our local KOBserver.

The inevitable hiccups were minor, and once set up, the link worked fairly well.

Using the link over the course of the day we encountered three kinds of issues. While not show stoppers, they were interesting to work through, and were related to issues with the connection at Heritage Park, equipment adjustments, and procedures.

The main connection issue was that the Heritage Park guest WiFi system blocks the port used by MorseKOB! I (Kevin) ended up using my old flip phone as a hot spot which worked fine until the battery died later in the afternoon.

The main equipment issue was also at Heritage Park and that was the adjustments of the sounder in Midnapore and the relay at Laggan. The current strength and signal speed on the line when using the KOB interface is different than what we normally have so that made some characters indistinct.

The procedure issues were interesting given the complexity of having THREE stations on the line. Key closer etiquette is a big one, call and response procedures are more important when it is not obvious where traffic is going to or coming from, and trying to handle three sets of guests around us in the stations at the same time can be tricky too!

The Champion Park Station

None of these issues are insurmountable and we are working on formalizing procedures and developing standard hardware setups to bring more permanent connectivity to the Railway and Historic Museums in Alberta and Western Canada.

A Historic first step indeed.

 Thanks to the members of the Calgary (CG) Chapter of the MTC and the Heritage Park MTC for their support and skills and to Heritage Park and Champion Park for letting us use their historic equipment to make this link!

 

The whole MTC crew at Champion
L to R
Ken Ashmead, Marilyn Maguire, Mia Salomakhin,
Kevin Jepson, Selwyn Morris

73
Ciao
Kevin Jepson
Instigator, "Wire-Chief", and acting Dispatcher for the AlbertaMTCwire Project.