Today it is customary to scold the Land of Soviets more, remembering "everything bad." But the Soviet people were proud of their country and they were proud for a reason. Today I would like to tell you about the Altai communication system, which was born in the USSR and became the first swallow of automatic mobile communication - the “mother” of all today's mobile and cellular communication systems that have become so firmly established in our life.
According to many people, mobile communication came to us from abroad. And according to a well-established legend, in April 73, the director of the Motorolla mobile communications department, Martin Cooper, made the first call on a mobile phone on the streets of Manhattan … Yes, it was, but was it the first?
The development of the Soviet system of automatic mobile communications "Altai" began in 1958, and the whole Union: in the Voronezh Research Institute of Communications, telephones and base stations for them were designed and constructed, antennas were created in the Moscow GSPI (work on television was also carried out there), Belarusian and Moldovan the specialists worked on many and many nuances - after all, they were the first, there was no one to take the development from.
Altai was developed as a full-fledged telephone for installation in a car. That is, it had to provide a normal conversation in full duplex mode, a standard subscriber selection by dialing a certain number (without the participation of additional people - dispatchers, etc.). Since there was no digital technology, it was quite difficult to realize such opportunities. But in 1963, the experimental coverage area of the Altai system in Moscow started working. It was originally one station with sixteen radio channels. A similar American system began to work only at the end of 69th.
Altai and Altai-3M.
And by the mid-70s, the Altai communication system was present in one hundred and fourteen cities of the USSR. And for the Olympics-80, the third modification of the Altai-3M was made. And after that, on the basis of the existing stations, the Volemot system was developed, which is even more similar to today's cellular systems. It implemented the ability to switch from one base station to another right during a call.
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Even after the emergence of GSM mobile operators in Russia, Altai could offer a number of advantages over the new technology: group calls, conference calls, “request to call”, call forwarding, closed corporate network … Altai began to finally dismantle this system only in 2011! And our mobile did not receive further development (like many other undertakings) due to the misunderstanding by the higher ranks of the availability of such communication as a possible "threat to state security", such are the things …