Who requested to transmit?

[Bill]

How was this transmitter used? Did government officials line up in a queue with their requests to send messages?

Topic

[Bill]

Thanks!!

[AlexanderSAQ]

Bill;
The SAQ transmitter was remotely controlled from the “Radio central” at the Swedish telecom office in Gothenburg, some 80km away from Grimeton.
Telegrams arrived there from the government, from companies and from ordinary people. The messages was guaranteed to be conveyed to the US within 20 minutes, which was much faster than with a transatlantic cable, for example from Norway.
There were four workplaces for transmission, where the contents of the telegrams were punched into perforated strips in special devices. The procedure was called punching and the devices were called perforators. In turn, the perforated strips were then fed into another device called a transmitter. In the transmitter, the information on the hole strips was converted into Morse signals, which were forwarded to Grimeton. There were two permanent telegraph lines which could be used for remote control of the SAQ transmitter and for service messages between the two stations. Typically, the transmitter was started very early in the morning at Grimeton and this was reported to Gothenburg, who then started the punched paper transmitter and directly controlled the telegraph relay on the SAQ transmitter, which sent out the messages into the ether. When there was no more messages, typically very late in the evening, the transmitter was shut down for a few hours until the next day’s telegrams.
The signal between Gothenburg and Grimeton was driven by 48V batteries with the current limited to 30mA, which equals 1.5W. The current was permanent and the morse transmitter in Gothenburg reversed the polarity at “key down”, meaning that the signal relay at Grimeton was forced to open / close and was not depending on a spring. This allowed for very high speed communication, up to 450 characters per minute.

Fredrik / Alexander assocation

[Author]

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