Yesterday, many publications and blogs published articles that mobile communications turned 47 years old (April 3, 1973 Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first call on a mobile phone from a New York street), but at that moment mobile communication had been working in the USSR for ten years (!). True, it did not work for everyone.
I have in my hand the receiver of the Altai mobile phone.
In fact, the first communication systems in cars appeared much earlier. Already in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi installed a transceiver on a steam car, and in 1933 police cars in the United States began to be equipped with radios. In 1946, a mobile network was launched in America with manual selection of the frequency channel and communication through the operator. Communication worked in half-duplex mode, as in radios.
In 1957 the Soviet engineer L. AND. Kupriyanovich created a prototype of the LK-1 mobile phone, which, unfortunately, did not go into serial production, but his "Radiofon" can be considered the first mobile phone.
Work on the Altai automatic mobile communication system began in 1958. Telephones and base stations were created at the Voronezh Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS). Antennas have been developed at the Moscow State Specialized Design Institute (GSPI). Enterprises from Leningrad, Belarus and Moldova also took part in the project.
The Altai system made it possible to use a telephone in the car in the same way as an ordinary telephone - you just had to pick up the phone and dial the number. The connection worked in full duplex mode, as in conventional telephones.
Altai was mobile, but not cellular - there was only one base station for the whole city. In Moscow, it was first located on a high-rise building on the Kotelnicheskaya embankment, and before the 1980 Olympics it was moved to the Ostankino tower.
Initially Altai worked at 150 MHz and had 16 channels. In the whole city, only 16 subscribers could speak on a mobile phone at a time.
In 1970 Altai worked in 30 cities, and by the mid-70s already in 114 cities of the Soviet Union.
Later, new radio channels were allocated (22 "trunks" of 8 channels each) in the 330 MHz range, which allowed 176 subscribers to talk simultaneously.
The mobile phone consisted of several blocks. A block with a tube and dialing buttons was installed between the front seats.
In the trunk there is a radio transmitter unit, on the car roof there is an antenna.
In total, by the beginning of the 1980s, the Altai system had about 25 thousand subscribers throughout the country. These were mainly members of the government and officials.
All these dates (both 63 and 47 years old) mark only the first calls for prototypes, but not for mass products. The real cell phone is "only" 37 years old: On March 6, 1983, the world's first commercial portable cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was launched. The phone cost $ 3995, weighed 794 grams and measured 33x4.4x8.9 cm.
Interestingly, AT&T commissioned a study from McKinsey in the early 1980s to find out how many mobile phones would be in use in the world in 2000. McKinsey concluded that there would be about 900,000 mobile phones in the market in 2000, and AT&T considered the mobile business to be insufficiently promising. Analysts were wrong 800 times, in 200 there were 738 million mobile subscribers.
I got a mobile phone in 1999. It was Philips Aeon working in the DAMPS standard.
When did you get your first mobile phone and what was it like?
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project - lamptest.ru. I test LED bulbs and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.