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116 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Leading Digital TV Industry Publication — 01-02/2015 —
This is Thomas Krüger next to a transmit-
ter tube in mint condition for medium wave
signals. As always, there’s a story behind
the product: “RIAS radio signals from
West Berlin were hugely popular among
GDR listeners, but not welcome at all
by GDR authorities. Jammers were
installed that used exactly the same
frequencies as RIAS and caused
heavy interference with the signals
from the West.” The replacement
tube for one of those jamming
transmitters is the one on
display in the museum. A
relict from the Cold War and
testament to a regime that
invested absurd amounts of
money to jam signals from
the ‘enemy’.
From a purely technical point of view,
there had never been a need for antenna
amplifiers in what used to by the Ger-
man Democratic Republic (GDR). Under
communist rule the state made sure all
TV and radio signals of the government-
controlled broadcasting system were
readily available all over the country. It
was only in a few exceptional cases that
amplification of already strong signals
made sense. So why were antenna am-
plifiers available in East Germany in the
first place?
We met two men who should know.
They both run a museum with a large
variety of antenna amplifiers on display,
all of which were used in the former GDR
at some time. How come Thomas Krüger
and Günter Wünsch are in the know
about this particular aspect of television
reception? They both used to work in a
plant that was specialised in the produc-
tion of antenna amplifiers in East Ger-
many.
Today, Thomas Kruger and Gunter
Wunsch jointly run a business with the
name SAT-Kabel ,
which they founded in August of 1990.
They have a workforce of almost 40 em-
ployees and produce similar products as
their former employer, VEB Elektronische
Geräte Burgstädt (EGB). As a communist
country, the GDR had nationalised al-
most the entire economy, and VEB was
a German abbreviation that appeared in
thousands of company names, meaning
nationally-owned enterprise.
Burgstädt is a small town near Chem-
nitz in eastern Germany. In SAT-Ka-
bel’s seminar room Thomas Kruger and
Gunter Wunsch have set up their mu-
seum. Several display cabinets present
antenna amplifiers made by VEB EGB, as
well as similar products dating from that
time. “This entire line of business can
be considered a contradiction in terms,
if you think about it. People in the GDR
hardly ever required an amplifier to re-
ceive the country’s state-run channels,
but naturally they all wanted to catch
signals from West Germany as well.”
By law this was not allowed in the GDR,
which meant that interested people and
– above all – manufacturers of required
equipment had to be creative in order to
meet that demand without actually call-
ing a spade a spade. “So the make-belief
argument was that antenna amplifiers
allowed to service several apartments
with the same cable, which in turn al-
Antenna Amplifier Museum in Burgstädt, Germany MUSEUM REPORT
Looking back at TV
reception in former
East Germany