Ray Waines, retired CBC Vancouver Cameraman, came across an interesting article on the CBC 75th Anniversary website about an event that changed how Television was broadcast across Canada in the 1950s. It prompted him to share his own memory of those early days...
My Introduction to Canada's Electronic Skyway
by Ray Waines
I remember listening to Ross Whiteside (CBUT's first Technical Director) describing how Television pictures from the 1954 British Empire Games and the Ripple Rock demolition were sent back to eastern Canada.
The route for those early Television broadcasts had to go down through the United States and was very complex. In fact, Ross said that the audio portion went via a different route from the video and then when the transmissions finally arrived in Toronto through New York, the audio was delayed to match the video!
Since Toronto could not send this live feed to the western provinces, kines (black & white film recordings), were shipped out west to Winnipeg and Regina for delayed broadcasts. All this was about to change when a new microwave network using 139 towers completed the Television route across Canada!
What makes this story so interesting for me is that I worked at a plant assembling and wiring those microwave systems...
That's me on the left of the vertical rack, steadying it before we moved it over to the test bay. This plant was Lenkurt Electric, located in Burnaby on Lougheed Highway. To move it up to the base of a tower, a helicopter would carefully fly it up to one of the mountains in B.C. Some of these microwave systems were repeaters, used to relay the Television signal and of course many were used to cross the prairies and on to Toronto.
This microwave network was completed in 1958 and two years later I was a CBC Television Cameraman working on a 1960 Grey Cup Game in Vancouver, with the pictures from my camera being sent back live across Canada through these microwave systems, coast to coast! I still find it amazing, considering that each one of these systems had many vacuum tubes and any towers on mountains were powered by generators!
If you would like to see how important this new microwave network was to CBC, then look at this website titled Canada's Electronic Skyway...
http://www.cbc.ca/75/mobile/touch/blog/2011/06/the-microwave-network-canadas-electronic-
skyway.html