Altai communication system tower (Orenburg)

The Altai communication system tower stands on Sovkhoznaya Street (No. 154) in Orenburg, Russia. The steel mast, about 111 metres tall, was built for the Soviet Altai car radiotelephone system; among the city's telecom structures only the GTRK TV tower is taller. Today it carries antennas of mobile operators.

The Altai radiotelephone system

Altai was a Soviet analogue automatic duplex radiotelephone system for vehicles, the first network of its kind in the USSR. It was developed from the 1950s to the early 1960s by GSPI (Moscow), the Krasnaya Zarya plant and NII-56 (Leningrad) and the Voronezh NIIS, who covered everything from antennas and switching equipment to the basic principles and algorithms.

Each network was built around a single central radio station whose antenna was placed as high as possible to cover the whole city and its surroundings, which is why cities served by Altai got towers like this one. The subscriber set was installed in a car and was bulky, weighing about 13 kilograms. Later upgraded versions such as Altai-3M worked in the band around 330 MHz.

Unlike many departmental radio networks, Altai was conceived as a general system able to unite various radio networks into the country's unified automated communication system. The Altai phone was found in the cars of officials, services and government bodies.

History

The system went into service in 1963 and eventually covered about 200 cities in the USSR and the Comecon countries. Its basic principles, laid down in the early 1960s, barely changed until the end. As cellular networks spread, subscribers dwindled, and in the 2010s Altai was gradually shut down.

The tower today

The Orenburg tower outlived the system itself: its height proved useful to mobile operators, and the mast now holds antennas of modern standards. It is a working telecom site on closed grounds and cannot be climbed, but it is clearly visible from Sovkhoznaya Street and nearby neighbourhoods.