The reasons for increasing the height at Hyannis are very complicated and complex.

Verizon
hopes this brief overview will help explain the complicated studies that were conducted, and why
Verizon is asking for a height increase in Hyannis to increase the reliability of Nantucket’s
telecommunications services. In 2016 Verizon upgraded the microwave radios and antennas
that serve Nantucket. Although these upgrades have helped the service to Nantucket, the service
is still affected by the atmospheric conditions described in the studies

Due to repeated outages on the Hyannis to Nantucket microwave path, Verizon contracted NEC
to evaluate and, if possible, redesign the existing path. NEC supplies equipment required for
network implementation to telecom carriers, along with network control platform systems and
operating services.

The path between Hyannis and Nantucket is approximately 26.3 miles long and about 85% of
that distance is over the sea. There are also frequent heavy fog conditions in the microwave path.

The combination of the sea surface and the fog creates a condition called Multipath Fading. In an
ideal case, a microwave is transmitted from the sending end to the receiving end as a single
beam. When certain conditions are in place, that beam can refract, reflect, and scatter. This
causes multiple “copies” of the microwave beam to arrive at the receiver at the same time. When
this happens, signal loss occurs.

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Refraction of a beam is a “bending” of the beam as it moves between two different mediums,
such as between air and water. This is the case when the beam enters and leaves a droplet of fog.
In the picture below, we see an example of light being refracted. The pipe entering the water is
straight, but it appears bent because the light waves bend as they move from the water to the air.

Scattering happens when a beam encounters differences in the air (different temperatures,
presence of water droplets, etc.); it causes the beam to “fan out”. You can see this with light
sometimes during a sunset. The light that should be coming in a straight line from the sun is
instead spread out and scattered. It makes for a pretty sunset, but it seriously hampers microwave
communications.

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Reflection of a microwave beam is perhaps more intuitive – the surface of water can reflect a
microwave beam, just as it can a beam of light. There is only one mountain below, but your eye
sees two because of the reflection of the water. You brain is smart enough to know what is
happening, and you do not think that there is a second upside down mountain, but in the case of a
microwave radio receiver, the receiver “sees” two incoming signals and this can cause signal
loss.

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The above phenomena can create a situation called Multipath Interference. Multipath
Interference occurs when a beam, instead of traveling by one direct path, travels by two or more
paths to a receiver, and cancels itself out at the receiver. If you have two sources of waves, at
certain points the two waves will “add together” and make bigger waves, and at other points will
cancel each other out. It does not matter if the waves are ocean waves, waves of light, or
microwaves that you eye cannot see, it still happens.

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This is what is happening on the Hyannis path. When the fog comes in, the refraction and
scattering from the fog, coupled with the reflections from the sea, cause a series of “high waves”
and “low waves”. Right now, with the way that the antennas are situated, they sit in an area of
“low waves”.

NEC used Pathloss 5 software, an industry standard, to model the performance of the radios on
the link. They included the physical setup of the towers and the antennas, as well as the
atmospheric condition. With existing centerlines, the link did not meet the required signal
strength, as represented by the crossing green lines below. Therefore the path would experience
significant multipath fading and outages.

To make the path more reliable, the centerlines of the antennas need to be moved higher.
Raising the Hyannis antennas to 145ft and 115ft is the height required to move the antennas to a
space where they will not be impacted by Multipath Interference, as indicated by the non-
crossing green lines below.

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Why not raise the antenna in Nantucket?

The tower in Nantucket is already 225 feet high. Increasing the height of the tower in Nantucket
will increase the angle of the beam in relation to the sea – in effecting pointing it further down.
This would cause it to reflect even more, and would cause more interference. As a corollary,
lowering the Nantucket antenna will not help either, as it will not get the beam far enough from
the sea surface.

Why is this an issue now and why wasn’t the tower higher to begin with?

There are two reasons that this has become an issue. When the tower was originally designed for
the microwave path, the microwave radios used higher frequency waves. With the development
of cell phones, the government allocated some of the higher frequencies that were previously
used for microwave to the cell phones. This required us to use lower frequencies on the
microwave path. Higher frequencies go through atmospheric conditions in a much straighter
path; there is less reflection, refraction, and scattering. This is why they were chosen for cell
phone use. Unfortunately, this means that the lower frequencies used for microwave now have
more scattering, refraction, and reflection. The second reason is that there have been more
instances of fog, for whatever the reason may be, over the last number of years, increasing the
number of outages.

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