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Spar's Return to Pakistan in 1980 John Barkwith, December 2016

Background Mike Morris's article, "The Pakistan Earth Stations Project” gives an overview of the contract signed with Pakistan Post Telephone and Telegraph "PTT" in 1969 for Intelsat Standard A stations in Pakistan. Dave Barnby was the project engineer and his account, "Return to Karachi Earth Station" expands on the theme by describing the program and some of the problems in the actual project implementation. Together, these articles, along with some of the contribution to the SPARtans blog, have given a good summary of the Spar experience with this very large project including the disruption caused by the war between India and Pakistan. In this paper I'm going to add some observations based on my involvement in the original project and then tell some stories about a major retrofit and expansion of the Karachi earth station a few years after the original installation. Installation of the Deh Mandro (Karachi) Earth Station After the end of the hostilities between India and Pakistan I returned to Karachi in April of 1972 along with Randy Martin, as installation manager and Dave Barnby, as project engineer. I know that Dave has difficulty remembering my being part of the team but I believe there may be a couple of reasons for this. One may have been because my firm control of the Ground Communications Equipment (GCE) meant that there were no problems with that equipment to impress themselves on Dave's memory! The other reason may have been that I stayed at a different hotel from Dave. He stayed at the Palace Hotel whereas I stayed at the Midway House along with Mike Leahy, his wife Pam, and Jimmy Stone, one of the installers. Out of sight - out of mind. Anyway, believe it or not, I was there - and for more than three months! Along with Mike Leahy I was responsible for the GCE but I also recall helping Bill Fosty with the parametric amplifiers and Ken Bush with the High Power Amplifiers. The installation work was hard and it was very hot during the daily commute across the desert by car. It was also oppressively hot in the earth station since the air conditioning was the very last subsystem to become operational. For these reasons it was nice sometimes to take a ride on Sundays away from Karachi to an area where there was rich agriculture - vineyards, dates, mangos etc.

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Work at Deh Mandro Earth Station Site 1972

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Pictures from Sunday Jaunts, 1972

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They were nice trips with Mike and Pam Leahy to the countryside. I remember the people in the country serving us tea and giving us mangos to take away - and refusing payment. They were very different from the city folks in Karachi - like country people the world over, I suppose. Eventually, as my work at the site was coming to an end it was time for me to go home. As Dave recounts, it's not always easy to get away from these large installation projects. Project managers often like you to stay for an extra week or so just in case there are problems. When the time came for me to leave, Alex Mackenzie was the site manager and I remember gingerly telling him I was thinking of leaving. Then, a bit later, telling him I was arranging my ticket and finally on the night before I left, calling him at the Palace Hotel and letting him know I was on the next flight. "Okay, have a nice trip" he said - much to my relief. Return to Pakistan in 1980 With the introduction of the Intelsat V satellites, starting in 1980, existing stations were required to upgrade their antenna feeds to enable them to take advantage of the dual-polarization capability of the new satellites. This opened up opportunities for sales of Peter Foldes' feeds, and one of the Spar sales people - Ted Kuskowski - decided to focus on this side of the business and pursued these sales very aggressively. When a station acquired a new feed, there was inevitably a need for additional equipment - GCE, low noise amplifiers, high power amplifiers etc. - to operate on the second polarization. Also, during the period while the station was out-of-action for retrofit (from 4 to 8 weeks typically), there was sometimes a need of a second earth station to carry the traffic. Thus, Ted hoped to build up the value of contracts for the retrofit of earth stations with these additional items. When the Deh Mandro station came up for a feed retrofit I was Ted's technical support and we put a lot of time and energy into preparing a proposal. This encompassed the full scope of everything we hoped to include in the contract including the feed, communications equipment and a small separate station to carry the traffic during the main station downtime. Then off we went to Pakistan for meetings with PTT and to present our solution. In Pakistan, along with Mohammed Ahmad, who had been the agent on the original earth station project, we visited the Deh Mandro station where we were hosted by Akhtar Ahmad Bajwa from PTT. He had been a leading figure in the original installation and had been among the engineers trained in Montreal. As Mike Morris pointed out, he eventually rose to a very high position in their organization - to Director General, I believe.

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Akhtar Ahmad was an affable chap and liked to reminisce about the original installation project. In mock exasperation he pointed to a sloppy piece of installation - an opening in the antenna pedestal wall for waveguides which had been informally 'sealed' with some packing material stuffed around the waveguides. "Do you remember how we complained about this to Randy Martin at every weekly meeting for the duration of the project? Look, it's still the same after all these years!" he exclaimed. After the Karachi trip we all went to PTT's headquarters in Islamabad where PTT were to hold meetings with the bidders, i.e. Spar and Nippon Electric Company (NEC.) These meetings went on and on for ages with a huge amount of haggling over numerous technical issues and, of course, pricing. Needless to say, we had a lot of spare time on our hands while PTT were talking to NEC or thinking things over among themselves and this gave us a chance to visit the sights around Islamabad and the nearby North West Frontier Province. I'm now going to relate some of my memories of these side trips and I've included some pictures taken at the time. I'll return to the contract negotiations later. Murree Hills One nearby attraction we visited was the Murree Hills, just to the north of Islamabad,. This had been a resort town established in colonial times as a cool area for rest and recuperation of British troops stationed at Rawalpindi. A very nice area. Darra A more adventurous trip was to a village called Darra, a few miles to the south. In this village nearly every shop on the main street was selling guns of all types which they manufactured locally. The gun 'workshops' were extremely basic, with no work benches or machine tools. The craftsmen worked on the cement floors using simple hand-tools such as drills and files. The most sophisticated device I saw was something that looked as if it might have been a hand-operated lathe. But the guns they produced looked entirely authentic to my eye. And I know they worked since every few minutes shots rang out as customers stepped into the street and tested the guns by firing into the air. The most popular items seemed to be the AK47 rifles prominently displayed in all the shops but there were guns of all types. They showed me a pistol disguised as a pen and assured me that it worked. It was marked 'Made in Italy' but this, I was told, was because the local craftsmen copy everything including brand names and serial numbers when they make the guns. I didn't take any pictures; the constant sound of gunfire made me too nervous for photography.

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Visits to Murree Hills and Peshawar 1980

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Peshawar Peshawar was the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Our trip there came about because we were also trying to sell domestic satellite communications equipment to PTT and they advised us to visit the telecom people in Peshawar who were apparently considering a domestic satellite system for their region. Actually, I think PTT were just trying to get rid of us for a few days! Mike Morris will remember that one of Spar's current offerings at that time was FM-Single Channel per Carrier (FM-SCPC) and that was the subject of our presentations in Peshawar. One of the main priorities of the Peshawar PTT was to improve the communications to Gilgit, located to the north among the Karakorum mountains, and they encouraged us to make a visit. So that's what we did. Gilgit To get to Gilgit you needed to take a flight on a Fokker F27 Friendship airplane. This flight zigzagged through the mountains. I don't think the aircraft had the capability to fly over the mountains hence the zigzag path along a valley. One minute the sun would be streaming in through the windows on the left and the next minute through the windows on the right. There was only one flight in each direction per day and flights would be cancelled if there was any sign of bad weather - and any clouds at all were considered bad weather. Flight cancellations were therefore quite common and actually our flight back to Islamabad was postponed by one day because of a few wispy clouds. Our stay in Gilgit was memorable. We stayed at an inn next to a mountain called Rakaposhi, 25,500 feet high! Pretty high - not much smaller than Mount Everest's 29,000 ft. The area around Gilgit is the most beautiful I have ever seen and for years after this trip I would recommend it to people looking for interesting places to visit. I only stopped recommending it after 9/11 when Pakistan in general and this area in particular acquired a bad reputation. Still, it's a fantastic place and the apples and pears they grow there are the best I have ever tasted. I took lots of pictures and some of them are shown on the next page.

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Visit to Gilgit in North West Frontier Province 1980

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Khyber Pass The Khyber Pass starts near Peshawar and links with Afghanistan. Naturally, we felt this was worth a visit and we found someone to take us on a very rough trip through the pass in a Jeep. The mountains are very rugged and don't look as if they can support life of any kind but nevertheless there are little villages snuggled in the valleys. I remember we stopped at a small shop for refreshments and bought some tea and Huntley and Palmer biscuits! And on the radio there was a cricket match playing. So there we were, at the ends of the earth, sipping tea while in the background was the characteristic sound and cadence of a cricket broadcast. I was instantly transported back to England. At the Afghanistan border I was surprised to find that the local people were crossing the border in both directions at will and not being bothered by the guards at all. Very surprising, especially since the Russians had occupied Afghanistan the year before and there was an insurgency in progress. However as we approached, the guards became very alert and it was clear that they would not have allowed us through. It didn't matter - we had no intention of crossing anyway! Then we turned around and headed back to Peshawar. But not before I took a picture of a sign saying "Make sure you reach Peshawar before nightfall" and "Don't take any pictures of local tribal womenfolk." I remember that Mohammed had told me that Pakistanis had a very high regard for these northern people (Pashtuns, I believe.) They have a reputation as being very tough but fair and honest business partners. Just don't cross them! Anyway, we made it back to Peshawar before nightfall. I gained a lot of respect for the humble American Jeep on this trip. When you see them in suburban Canada they look like toys, but actually they have an incredible ability to traverse rough country. And I saw some carrying loads of lumber that must have weighed tons. Very tough vehicles!

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Trip Through the Khyber Pass 1980

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And back to those negotiations ... To cut a long story short, we did succeed in winning the contract for the feed and the expansion communications equipment for the Deh Mandro station. This was for a substantial amount - can't remember how much exactly - and with good margin. We should have been happy - but we were not - because NEC won the (smaller) contract for a separate earth station to carry traffic during the retrofit. Here's what happened: PTT's plan to carry traffic during the retrofit, as recommended to them by Intelsat, had been to buy an Intelsat Standard B station equipped with a 11-meter antenna. The Standard A station carried a traffic load of about 450 voice channels and the Intelsat-recommended plan was for PTT to select a subset of these voice channels (about 120 channels) and to allocate these to the Standard B station and form a link to the Italian earth station at Fucino. The Italian station would then use their station to distribute these circuits to the various destination countries. This convoluted arrangement was considered necessary because the 11-meter antenna could not support the full load of 450 voice circuits. At Spar, Ted and I had wondered if we could come up with a better idea - and we did! We visited Intelsat in Washington and proposed that the additional station be equipped with a somewhat bigger antenna (13-meter). Then, with a reduced rain margin and slightly lower signal-to-noise ratio, the station could carry the full load of 450 circuits during the retrofit. Intelsat agreed to this and they put their agreement in writing for us. This solution was a huge advantage to PTT. Not only would they retain the revenue from the 450 circuits, they would avoid having to share any revenue with the Italians and they would also avoid the big task of reconfiguring their equipment to cut the circuits down to 120. The advantage to Spar was that we would not be head-to-head with NEC. They would be bidding an 11-meter antenna and we would have a superior proposal with a 13-meter antenna. After initially rejecting our solution, and following numerous meetings with us, PTT eventually saw the advantages of our solution and 'bought-into' our plan. But, instead of announcing Spar as the winner and awarding us the contract, they simply asked NEC to match our proposal and give a price for a 13-meter solution. NEC promptly did this, making sure to undercut our price. And that was that! Following another raft of meetings in which Ted and Mohammed ranted and raved, PTT awarded the contract to NEC.

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Why did PTT do this? I'm sure the usual marketing shenanigans played a part but probably the main reason was that NEC was considered the gold standard of earth stations in those days. Nobody ever got fired for buying NEC. So Spar won a nice contract for the retrofit of Deh Mandro and this could have been considered a success story. But for me and Ted and Mohammed it was a huge disappointment. I don't think Ted ever recovered and he left the company shortly thereafter. A few years later, in the mid eighties, I visited Pakistan again with Alex Grant (our China sales person at the time) and we met with Mohammed. At supper Momammed bitterly told this same story (in much more detail) and it was evident that he had never got over the defeat either. His account included some stuff I had forgotten like the catch phrases we had used at the time: Our 'multi-destination' solution as opposed to NEC's inferior 'single-destination' approach. It was all very fresh in his mind. So there it is. You win some and lose some.