Okay, I’m stretching a little bit in order to make a Kingston Trio reference. So sue me. The title of this post should be “Where have all the antennas gone?” The photo above shows the AT&T communications tower atop the hill on 15th street in northeast Bismarck. The tower has been here far longer than I have…what’s changed is the equipment that’s hanging on it.

Originally this tower had the big cone-shaped antennas that indicated that it was a microwave relay station. You can still see a tower decked out with these east of Dickinson, and I remember seeing another one between here and Fargo…but I’m not sure exactly where.

This is what such a tower would normally look like. With fiber optic running everywhere and digital transmission replacing analog, I guess this type of thing is just unnecessary these days. That means that those Two Towers (sorry, Lord of the Rings reference) mentioned above may be retasked as well.

The array of antennas that currently occupy this behemoth are cellular antennas. You can determine if a tower is a cellular phone tower by these telltale antenna arrays, often oriented in a triangular pattern. Since AT&T is trying to establish a cellular presence in Bismarck, and they apparently haven’t the need for microwave equipment on this tower, cellular antennas have magically replaced those big ol’ cones. I don’t know how quickly it happened, but I noticed it suddenly. Watching them swap that equipment out would have been somewhat entertaining.

AT&T built a ton of these towers in the 1950s as part of the Long Lines project. I don’t know if this particular tower was part of that project, or at least the original phase of it. I found a map of those microwave relay sites here but I don’t have dates or other specific information to attach to this particular tower. Many of them don’t even belong to AT&T anymore…because of the logo on the side of the building I’m just assuming that this one still does.