AT&T Microwave Station
Middletown

Site Data

Address: 8209 Valley Pike, Middletown (Frederick County), VA
(Along route I-81, about 13 mi. SW of Winchester, VA.)

Latitude: N39-01-04 (39.0178)

Longitude: W78-17-29 (-78.2914)

Elevation: 714 ft.

FCC License Data

Callsign WMQ420.

Description

Middletown's physical facilities consist of a large, modern one-story building, a parking lot, and two short self-supporting towers, each tower holding a pair of conical reflector horn antennas. The building's style is unusual among AT&T facilities, and can be explained by the fact that it was built and first used by Western Union.

History and Cold War Role

Historian George P. Oslin, in "The Story of Telecommunications" (p. 417), writes:
The U.S. Post Office Department and Western Union jointly started a Mailgram Service January 1, 1970 which telegraphed mail to area points from which messages were delivered by mail. In 1975, 22.6 million mailgrams were sent. In 1972 the company built a large computer switching center to handle all telegraph messages at Middletown, Virginia, and phased out its fifteen reperforator switching centers.

According to an AT&T news release, WU's "Middletown Operations 102" became an AT&T facility in 1991, supporting the company's EasyLink service.

Present Function

Middletown is now a web server co-location facility for AT&T's commercial web-hosting business.

Microwave Path Map

The thick black lines represent currently-licensed paths

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Updated on April 24, 2000 at 20:00 by Albert LaFrance