Automatische Schnelltelegraphieanlage (Automatic High Speed Telegraphy System)
|
überarbeitet am 21.5.2013 |
In the fourties, an automatic high speed telegraphy transmitter, which was used by the Swiss Army for morse code training purposes, has been produced by Moser Baer, Sumiswald. The precision mechanics company Moser Baer does still exist nowadays, today the precision mechanics and eletronics company Mobatec and Mobatime, who does produce the famous Swiss railways clocks, are the successors of the original company.
In 1939, at the eve of World War II, it turned out, that the signalmen of the Swiss Army were not sufficiently trained to transmit messages with sufficiently high morse code speeds; their training and the receiver Lorenz Eo509/I was suitable to operate the "Hell printers" which were installed on Swiss high power stations. So the technical responsibles of the Swiss Army Signal Troops decided to introduce
automatic high speed morse code transmissions. The equipment was developed by
"Moser Bär", a Swiss precision mechanics company who had already produced a telegraphy
transmitting system (AMS) using punched paper tapes, which was used for morse code training purposes. High speed telegraphy has been introduced with the high power stations M1K, G1,5K as well as the C-Station in around 1944. After it turned out that overall message transmission speeds remained low as the morse code transcription procedure was time consuming, the Swiss Army Signals found that plain morse code transmissions with plaintext written down from the morse code heard in the headphones after a period of intense better morse code teaching and practicing showed better results then the technically advanced high speed telegraphy. Only after the introduction of the ETK plain text printer in the early fifties, automated telegraphy was used successfully with the Swiss Signal Troops. The high speed telegraphy transmitting system "MFA" has been developed by the precision
mechanics company Moser-Baer, Sumiswald. It consists of a tape puncher Sl b, the transmitting
unit GS 200b, the printing unit SR 200b and and electro - mechanical paper tape transport
unit. With the tape puncher SL b, which comes in it's own crate (37,0 kg with accessories) and
can be powered from 125 - 250 Volts AC, a punched paper tape with the text message is generated. The punched paper tape is inserted in the transmitting head of the transmitting unit,
so that the first hole of a line is on top and the second hole is below the transport holes;
the operating instructions recommend to mark the beginning of the paper tape with an arrow. The Printer Unit (Schreibgerät) SR 200b prints the morse code on a paper tape,
the transcription of the morse code to plain text is done manually. A paper tape
transport unit can be used to pull the paper tape with variable speed to have the hands
free for writing the letters down when decoding a message.
weitere Lektüre: © Martin Bösch 21.5.2013
|