Deal Test Site
The Deal Test Site (now Joe Palaia Park) is located in Ocean Township, New Jersey.
The Joe Palaia Park was originally started as the Foxburst Farm, a 63-acre (250,000 m2) tract which is now the southern portion of the park. It was purchased by Western Electric, (part of AT&T and later Lucent), in 1919. The site was later expanded with an additional 145 acres (0.59 km2) purchase by AT&T in 1927. The site is bounded by three major township roads, Deal Road, Whalepond Road, and Dow Avenue. Several homes on Whalepond Road, north of Freehold Street, and Dow Avenue, from the corner of Whalepond Road to the Ocean Township School, abut the property.
After World War I, AT&T used the site to conduct ship-to-shore wireless experiments off the Jersey Shore. Five large radio towers were eventually erected and used to broadcast speech and music for a range of 1,000 miles (1,600 km). In 1921, a two-story white building was built, which was used as a laboratory and dormitories for engineers.
Research continued through the 1930s in conjunction with Bell Telephone Laboratories (the successor to Western Electric’s research division), to use shorter wavelengths for radio transmission, this eventually led to the development of the microwave radio relay systems used to carry long distance telephone traffic in the latter half of the 20th century. The development of fiber-optic communications (also by Bell Labs) ended the widespread use of microwave repeaters.
Facilities at the test site were used in the 1950s and 1960s to monitor missiles and satellites launched from Cape Kennedy. It was instrumental in the development of TIROS-1 and TIROS-2 weather satellites.
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