Re: Long Wave broadcasting over telephone lines - Swiss style
Jason,
While I do not know all the exact technical details, I saw the Swiss Radio (SRG SSR) Wire Broadcasting "in action" as a listener during visits to that country many years ago. (1970s - 1980s?) Several hotels that I stayed in had a small radio in each guest room that was part of the Wire Broadcasting system. Basically these were small old tube sets, like a small AM table radio (in wood cabinets with cloth speaker covers, no less!). There was a volume/on/off control and a channel selector, which was either six pushbuttons or a rotary switch to select one of the 6 channels. There was an AC power cord and a separate UTP (Universal Tristed Pair) - style wire coming off the back of the set and plugged into a dedicated jack like a phone jack in the wall. The real phone however had a separate jack of a different type, so it would appear that the phone lines used for this system were separate from the regular telco lines.
The programming was usually rotated off the regular SRG SSR channels, of which there were proabaly one to two dozen, with multiple channels of all four Swiss languages, plus English from their shortwave programming.
I don't know the licensing deal there, but SRG SSR was at that time basically a non-profit monopoly (almost quasi-Govermnent) and the phone company was Government-owned, and like most Swiss institutions they probably cooperated. Also, radio and TV was supported mostly by license fees paid by people who owned radio sets (and TVs). If you didn't own a radio, you paid no fee, but if you did own one and neglected to pay your license fee, that was considered a (minor) crime.
I heard from some locals that also personally subscribed to the wire broadcasting for a fee.
I think the technical issues that lead to the development of wire broadcasting had to do with the challenges of good radio reception in the high, long, narrow and very sparsely populated valleys in the Alps. It would have been very costly to set up enough translator transmitters to ensure uniform and good coverage throughout the country. Imagine having to build a transmitter site miles from the power grid and equip it with the costly broadcast equipment (think 1950s or 1960s) up on mountains in a hostile environment. And then you only reached an additional 2,000 or 5,000 people if you were lucky.
And even in the cities, the hotels were concrete and steel girder structures that made a mess of regular AM reception. So the wire system was appealing there as well.
I think some other Western European countries, like Germany, the Netherlands, and others, had Wire Broadcasting as well.
Obviously broadcast technology eventually caught up. But it was a novel idea.
