May is the traditional satellite dish breeding season in Berkshire. As seen on the photo, the young ones are out of their underground dens, cautiously investigate the surrounding environment
@Prof_Trixie @kravietz When it's pandemic and you are supposed to work from home but you have a job at the NSA.
@kravietz @encarsia @Prof_Trixie
this is exactly what "BBC" Crowsley park is used for, and has been since end of WW II !
By the way, back in 90's I was so much impressed by Declan McCullagh reporting on Echelon that I registered echelon.pl domain for my personal blog and never imagined I'd be actually walking by its listening post while enjoying a pint of ale 😁
0118 947 **** was TXK (Crossbar) in the 1970s, 0118 948 **** TXE2 (electronic) in 1980s and 0118 946 **** TXD (digital, I think it was Ericsson System Y) in the 1990s, whilst central Reading (0118 95* *****) was still TXS (Strowger electromagnetic) until about 1987/1988 (I did work experience with British Telecom and got to visit a few exchanges in the area, but not Caversham (they tended not to encourage visitors 😉 )
Interesting, what's in there today? The building is sealed and doesn't seem to be in use.
it is still an active Telephone Exchange and the main distribution frame from all the copper pairs in the whole of Caversham will terminate there. Its likely that everything is now digital since the 1990s, so a lot of space is empty, but a Telephone Exchange always looks "sealed" from the front; the Openreach/BT engineers go in through secure entrances at the side and back with many codelocks, smartdoors and CCTV..
I think the front doors were only used in 1960s/early 1970s when the Post Office more often had Operator Assistance Centres co-located with the Telephone Exchange and there weren't as many security threats - by the mid 1970s there were concerns over the IRA and other groups targeting the buildings and certainly by mid-late 1980s they were some of the most heavily secured buildings anywhere in Britain (and to a great extent still are)
I'm driving there almost every day on work weeks taking my son to UTC, and last week he actually about... the Telephone Exchange as we usually spend significant amount of time in traffic there. I wasn't able to offer him much more information than what I knee about the old electromechanical exchanges I knew from Poland, throwing in some stories about phreaking and blue boxes 😁 By the way, on Twitter the author of this blog just replied https://radioatlanticodelsur.blogspot.com/
@kravietz
next time you are in Caversham, have a look at the Telephone Exchange on Church Street, and consider why it is so large and advanced looking (especially the bit round the back) for a relatively small suburb (they got the digital/electronic upgrades 6/7 years before Reading Central did, went to
6 digits before the main town, and many 0118 948 **** numbers and at one point whole blocks of 0118 946 **** numbers were used by the BBC...
@encarsia @Prof_Trixie