Ships on the high seas still occasionally make some use of shortwave radio, but its importance has greatly diminished over the last few decades. The Coast Guard still maintains a "watch" on emergency shortwave frequencies, listening for distress calls, but most transoceanic ships are now equipped with more modern, higher-bandwidth satellite communications systems.
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Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 02:25:12 JST Matt Blaze
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Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 02:25:09 JST Matt Blaze
Here, by the way, is what I believe was the last published frequency list and schedule for the High Seas service. (A souvenir of my last visit to the station before it went off the air.)
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Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 02:25:10 JST Matt Blaze
I should note that while the site had a number of discone antennas like this one, they were mostly there as backups in case the main antennas (including truly massive wire rhombics pointing toward various oceanic regions) or transmitter combiners failed. The old Bell System did not mess around.
LaF0rge repeated this. -
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Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Sunday, 17-Nov-2024 02:25:11 JST Matt Blaze
These places are what the Internet looked like a century ago.
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