‘Finding Alaska’s Villages’

PALMER — It’s people who care that shape the world.

That’s the main lesson of Palmer author Alex Hills’ new book, “Finding Alaska’s Villages: And Connecting Them.”

The autobiographical look at Alaska’s telecommunications history in the 1970s identifies the major players in bringing telephone, television, and radio to rural Alaska. The story, which bounces back and forth between descriptions of the harrowing plane travel, tech work and poignant human moments that typified Hills’ work on rural Alaska’s first phone and radio projects, reveal the mind of a man who gets along with both man and machine.

As a university professor today, he tries to impart that to his engineering students, he said. It’s the human touch that can make or break an engineering project.

His book begins with his life as a young man installing hardware to bring the first telephones to Alaska’s villages in the early 70s.

In many ways, this part of the story is about an engineering endeavor that floundered because it was out of touch with people. His predecessors on the project had not prepared villagers for the new tech, he writes. The company hadn’t bothered setting up a billing system that would enable people to pay for the time they used on each village’s single phone. So, new phones were shut off soon after they were installed.

As he struggled to come up with solutions and sent reports of problems on the ground headquarters, he began to suspect his company was of paying mere lip service to a project it had inherited in a deal with the state.

On the technical side, satellite dishes (called satellite earth stations at the time) were seen by Hills and a few others as a good solution to early challenges in getting signal across Alaska’s broad, rough terrain. But at a time when such stations were massive affairs, some doubted whether they could ever be brought down to a size small enough to be economical for a village.

“There was a big squabble about the small earth stations,” Hills said. “There were engineers who said you can’t make earth stations that small – about 16 feet. That was small at the time.”

Eventually, though, Alaska would become the first place in the world to see large-scale installation of small satellite dishes to enable communications.

In Hills’ story, it’s not the government or private sector that provides better public services in the end, but individuals who care about the people they’re serving, regardless of whether they work as public servants or employees of for-profit companies.

For every tale of communications technology ventures that failed due to low regard for rural Alaskans’ concerns, however, there are more about successes and innovations spurred by the men and women who thought that the people they served mattered.

The result, in Hills’ book, has been a more connected rural Alaska.

“I do a lot of work in developing nations,” Hills said, “and you have all those same kinds of issues when Americans go out wanting to do good, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. For me, a lot of this came naturally. I really connected with the people.”

Hills is an engineering professor at both University of Alaska Anchorage, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

At the latter institution, his students go on 10-week forays into developing nations to install new projects that they hope will benefit those communities.

But to ensure the success of those projects, Hills provides guidance based on what he learned in Alaska: listen to the locals first, and understand them, before you speak.

Hills’ new book also covers his time spent as a manager and engineer at KOTZ, one of a handful of public radio stations that popped up in Alaska the 70s. In many places in Alaska, Hills said, public stations were the first to offer radio service at all.

His stories about a station intimately connected with the people it served, and the mix of indigenous and English language programming it provided, give some historical context for the unique character of rural Alaska radio stations that carry a similar format today, such as KOTZ in Kotzebue, KYUK in Bethel, and KDLG.

“We really adapted the radio station to the local needs and customs,” Hills said. “A different attitude about doing a new radio station is, ‘Well, we’re from the big city, we know how to do this, we have our jingles.’ But that’s not what we did, and I think a lot of that was because all four of the announcers were local people.”

The work does contain some light tech talk. It’s the kind of thing that might be exciting for some, but boring to others, depending on one’s nerd orientation. But this part of the work also illuminates the ways in which Alaska’s unique challenges inspired a group of people to spearhead important innovations.

And, there are plenty of compelling stories about a human side Alaska’s history that on occasion goes for the heartstrings and plays them well, along with mini-portraits of a few of the lively characters who made Alaska in the 70s an interesting place.

The book is worth reading through just for those, even for readers whose eyes glaze over whenever someone starts talking antennas, sat signals and hardware. But even the tech parts have a human-interest side to them much of the time, and they’re mercifully free of industry jargon, so most readers should find them accessible.

When he’s not teaching, Hills is still at work today on Alaska’s communications future. He’s part of a project by Iridium Satellite Communications to provide satellite phone coms all over the globe.

Hills, who also led the team that built the first wi-fi network, said the project is another first of its kind. It relies on a mesh network of 66 satellites constantly moving around the planet. Instead of filling gaps in satellite communications with new geosynchronous satellites – those that orbit right along with the earth’s rotation, and stay in one place relative to an earth station – these satellites are in continuous movement around the globe, and all networked to one another. When a person wants to make a satellite phone call, the phone finds the satellite that happens to be closest, and then the signal gets transferred via the fastest route within the network to the target destination.

It’s a system that helps Alaska pilots who are out of reach of radio tower communications, as well as satellite phone customers.

As melting ice caps open the northern sea route for longer periods of time each year, Hills expects the maritime industries will use it, too.

“Even if you’re standing on the pole, you still have coverage,” Hills said. “So as the arctic opens up,

Iridium provides a communications system that will work even way up there.”

Alex Hills is the guest speaker at the Greater Palmer Chamber of Commerce meeting Wednesday, Nov. 16 at noon at the Palmer Moose Lodge, and is scheduled for a 4 p.m. book signing at Fireside Books in Palmer the same day. “Finding Alaska’s Villages” is available at Fireside Books, UAA Bookstore, and Gulliver’s in Fairbanks, and online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.