Getting to the bottom of system performance means making repairs on top Last fall we erected and cut over a two hop microwave. Receive signal on one path was 30 db lower than calculated. The guys said they aimed the 6' dish so its major lobe was receiving the strongest signal. Two times. Yeah, sure. Cobbled up a 18” dish and bought a 100 ft. length of (low loss) flex LMR-900 coax (supposed to be useable to near 7 ghz). Standing below the fixed dish 12' above, the received signal was exactly 18 db less than what Chuck calculated it should have been. Now we had a tool to figure out why system performance was nowhere near what it was supposed to be. Then, it snowed. Snow cat. Up the mountain. The hand held dish antenna indicated 18 db more than the tower mounted 6' dish. Climbed the tower, attached a homemade gunsite to the antenna. The far end was not where the big dish was pointing. “Gee, it was supposed to be right,” said the troops as they repeated the mantra: “There is always enough time to do it right the second time.” By the end of the day, the 25-db-signal gain was a tenth of a db what had been calculated for the path. And three telephone techs know more about microwave installations. And Chuck was smiling because we've got five more hops to do this summer. TAQUA Got bought out the latter part of January. Tekelec wants in the business. The venture capitalists on the Taqua board voted to accept an offer of nearly double their investment of the last round. Not mentioned were those who lost all in the old days when Taqua was hoping to ride the CLEC boom. No one has heard from the new owners about what their intentions are with respect to the fine product they purchased. "Gee it was supposed to be right," said the troops as they repeated the mantra: "There is always enough time to do it right the second time" NUMBER PORTABILITY When the recent day came and wireless number portability took effect, tens of thousands of customers took advantage and switched. The industry task forces that worked behind the scenes to make this work really worked very hard to make it happen. I'd like to give an “attaboy” to those in our industry who labored on that God-awful thankless job that enabled the system to (mostly) work to comply with the cutover date. The funniest part was in the days following cut. The Jan. 26 plea went out for companies to please stop yelling at each other about who's fault it was (when some LNP procedures got confused and didn't work) with the customer on line listening to the “he said, she said” arguments (which were to put it mildly) intense, stressful, loud, argumentative, mad-as-hell (name your poison). Again, with the customer listening! NEVADA Thinking of the stress of folks caught in the vacuum of LNP got me to thinking about how we feel bound when situations arise that fit the category of “gee, that didn't happen before.” Or the good feelings when someone cuts to the chase with authority and the will to make things happen. Like Fish and Wildlife telling the BLM that it has no authority to mandate an arch study before allowing Beehive to bury a telephone line to the Fish Springs office way to hell-and-gone in western Utah. Or the force I feel that the higher wisdom of Commissioners will prevail when bureaucrats such as Jeff Galloway of the Nevada PUC who, on the one hand believe it's O.K. for SBC Nevada to spend $23,000 per home to upgrade using fiber, but says straightfaced that my Beehive, doing the exact same thing nearby for $9,000, is fraught with peril and should be denied. © Beehive Telephone Co.