The Altai mobile telephone system is the pre-cellular 0G radiotelephone service that was first introduced in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

in 1963, and became available in the most large cities by 1965. It is a fully automated UHF/ VHF network that allows a mobile node to connect to a landline phones, and was originally conceived to serve government officials and

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, but has since spread into general use, and is still in use in some places, where its advantages outweigh those of conventional cellular networks. Work on the system of automatic duplex mobile communication started in 1958 in

Voronezh Voronezh ( rus, links=no, Воро́неж, p=vɐˈronʲɪʂ}) is a city and the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast in southwestern Russia straddling the Voronezh River, located from where it flows into the Don River. The city sits on ...

Research Institute of Communications (VNIIS, now concern Sozvezdie). It was established subscriber stations and base stations for communicating with them.

Technical information

From the technical standpoint "Altai" was fairly ordinary UHF/VHF trunked radio, but it was equipped with the automatic switching circuits on both mobile and static nodes that allowed the mobile end of the link to generate and transmit dialing signals and to connect the static end to the

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local teleph ...

. Few initial installations used 150

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frequency, but as the network grew the later iterations switched to 330 MHz. Base stations have had up to 22 independent trunks of 8 channels each, and were commonly mounted together with the TV transmitters, sometimes even sharing the HF circuitry. This allowed for good coverage, as there were generally only one base station per city.

Technical information

See also