ETAM — Two companies have shown an interest in purchasing the Etam Earth Station in Preston County.
The earth station has been on sale since at least 2018 with no stated asking price.
Duke Jordan, a sales professional with Great Expectations Reality Commercial division in Charleston, said both an international and a national company are interested.
He said neither of the companies have purchased the station yet but are at phase one and two, making sure the station and its property will meet their needs.
Earlier Jordan said the international company isn’t interested in tearing the station down. He said it indicated a desire 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.
On Nov. 14, 2018, the station obtained a kind of immortality when it moved into the world of computer gaming. It is featured in Bethesda Game Studios video game, Fallout 76, an action role-playing game that takes place in “Appalachia.”
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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