ETAM — An international satellite company could be interested in purchasing the Etam Earth Station in Preston County, according to Duke Jordan.
Jordan is a sales professional with Great Expectations Reality Commercial Division in Charleston.
He said the representatives who visited Etam last week are also looking at other possible sites.
Jordan said if purchased, the company isn’t interested in tearing the station down. He said they indicated they wanted to keep it as a company.
Etam Earth Station was built by Comsat around 1968 and formally began commercial operation on Christmas Eve of that year, according to a March-April 1977 article in Satellite Pathways Magazine by John Peterson.
Among its achievements, Peterson wrote that Etam was:
– the first U.S. station to operate with the INTELSAT III satellites.
– the first to introduce (in 1973) the SPADE system, where a pool of frequencies is kept available for users as-needed.
– the first to be equipped in the Atlantic region for high-speed digital data (50 kilobits per second, or 50,000 words per minute) service to Europe.
– and the first to work with the new INTELSAT IV-A satellites, which achieved a significant increase in communications capacity and flexibility by introducing frequency reuse through beam separation, the first commercial application of this concept in satellite communications.
Last year the station obtained a kind of immortality when it moved into the world of computer gaming.
Etam Earth Station is featured in Bethesda Game Studios video game, Fallout 76, an action role-playing game that takes place in “Appalachia” (the game name for West Virginia).
The game was released Nov. 14, 2018. It is the ninth game in the Fallout series, and is Bethesda Game Studios’ first multiplayer game.
Jordan said the real Etam Earth Station is still on the market. For more information about the station, contact Jordan at 304-415-0607 or email at Duke@bbhsger.com.
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