In the year since our survey paper was written for the 1971 Offshore Technology Conference we have been aware of a decline in the growth of telecommunications as applied to offshore petroleum operations. In the two years before 1971 significant strides were made in the development and application of new components and systems for telemetry and control, and for voice communications. Perhaps we are seeing a slowdown to allow the demand to catch up to the supply.
Through 1971 the offshore control systems market continued to be dominated by two or three major firms. The development of new systems seemed by all accounts to have stopped with the emphasis being placed on selling large systems using hardware and techniques developed during the peak years, 1968-70. No major breakthrough in transmission systems were announced. Microwave and data equipment manufacturers continued to offer the same level of sophistication in their Wares. Only a handful of new products made their debut with perhaps the most significant being the introduction of a medium-priced frequency synthesized marine high frequency single sideband transceiver by Communications Associates, Inc., of Long Island. The basic configuration provided forty discrete voice and/or radioteletype channels without the use of crystals. Operating frequencies could be changed in the field by a technician or operator using only a minimum of hand tools.
In the VHF market, the Big Three (General Electric, Motorola, and RCA) continued their leap-frog competition for the petroleum market. We were struck by the feeling that manufacturers were more interested in physical appearance than improved circuitry and performance. Several new firms entered the VHF-FM marine radio business with lower priced multi-channel transceivers. Competition in that area is indeed keen.
We also noted the entry by several new companies into the low cost voice scrambler market. Units offering one or several different "codes" and ranging in price from $400. 00 up began to appear in national publications. Much of the sales pitch continued to be that the use of a low cost secrecy device would protect the user from loss of security to the "casual" listener. One would wonder, however, if their usage might not be like waving a red flag at a bull in that the "non-casual" listener might deduce that the scrambled communications were of great importance and set out to "break" the code just to see what was up. Most low and moderate cost scramblers using band splitting and speech inversion techniques can be broken quite quickly using only a few thousands of dollars worth of unsophisticated equipment. True privacy in communications for both voice and teletype transmissions -- can cost a great deal and require diligent attention by operators.
On the user's side of the ledger a significant development was the entry by the J. Ray McDermott Company of New Orleans into the field of computer format data transmissions from offshore activities to onshore computers via high frequency radio circuits.
