Trans Canada Microwave
The contract was sent to both Bell and CNCP Telecommunications, the joint Canadian National Railway-Canadian Pacific Railway company that shared telegraph services.
[4] The Cabinet stepped in and passed a law stating that no company would be allowed a monopoly, at which point CNCP began plans for their own network concentrating in the heavily populated areas east of Manitoba.
To lower the cost compared to the TD-2 system being deployed by AT&T in the US, Bell Canada used double decking where possible, simplified power supplies, and added a microwave frequency switch that allowed the same antennas to be used for broadcast or reception depending on the immediate needs of the network.
[7] The first links in Ontario and Quebec were within areas served entirely by Bell, but this was not the case for the rest of the network, where smaller regional telephone companies held local monopolies.
This was carried out within the Trans-Canada Telephone System company, which had formed to handle the same sorts of issues for land-line cost sharing and long-distance fees.
Once selected, a temporary tower made of aluminium would be manually lifted into place and a small circular reflector hoisted to test the link and find the minimum altitude that gave it a good signal.
Getting the equipment into position could be an enormous task; in one case at Morrissey Ridge in British Columbia, it took two months to bulldoze a road to the proposed site.
Given this sort of delay, a new system was created in which a single workman would travel to the site and alert the next tower he was in place using a walky talky, then used a mirror to reflect the sun onto the next station to test the line of sight.
That allowed it cross the 127 kilometres across the Cabot Strait to a repeater station perched 198 metres above sea-level in Red Rocks, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Among the many programs the network enabled was Hockey Night in Canada[9] and a famous event held by CBC where people from across the country joined on television to sing Christmas carols live.
This changed in 1962 when the CNCP received a contract from the Canadian Overseas Telecommunications Corporation (COTC) to build a second nationwide microwave relay system.
COTC, a crown corporation, had formed to operate the CANTAT trans-Atlantic telephone cable in partnership with their counterparts in the UK, the General Post Office (GPO).
Bell argued to the Department of Transport that allowing CNCP to extend their network would lead to wasteful overcapacity, before then noting they were in the process of setting up their own second line anyway.
The original Aniks used the same 6 GHz frequencies as the TH system to make equipment interfacing easier, but the very low signal strengths from this pioneering satellite required large ground stations in remote locations to operate successfully.
