Qualla: Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bildarbeiter, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the evening of 22 December 1920, a few employees of the German post office climbed the Funkerberg carrying instruments they had brought from home. They played, they sang, they read poems aloud into a microphone wired to an arc transmitter borrowed from C. Lorenz AG, and the signal went out across Germany on a wavelength of 1,300 metres. Hardly anyone heard it. Private radio reception was illegal in Germany that Christmas and would remain illegal for nearly three more years. The first broadcast of speech and music in German history was, in effect, a concert performed for an audience that was not permitted to exist.

Image: Bildarbeiter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: Balloons Over the Windmill Hill

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SteffenKahl, CC BY-SA 3.0. The hill had been in the radio business for a decade already. From 1911 the German army ran experiments here on the Windmühlenberg, northwest of the small town of Königs Wusterhausen — mobile stations bolted to horse carriages, aerials hauled into the air by captive balloons. Fro...

Image: SteffenKahl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: The Man Who Wanted an Audience

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Hans Bredow had spent part of the war on the Western Front testing tube transmitters and feedback receivers alongside Alexander Meißner and Egbert von Lepel, and he had come away with an idea that most of his colleagues considered a distraction: that radio was not only a way of m...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: Der Dicke

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, CC BY-SA 3.0. What went up next was meant to be heard by the entire country. The nationwide Deutschlandsender was erected here in 1925, its signal carried on a forest of masts ranging from 100 to 210 metres. At the centre of them, built in 1924–25, stood a free-standing steel tower of triangul...

Image: Sebastian Wallroth | CC BY-SA 3.0

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: The Storm That Took the Tower

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1945 Königs Wusterhausen fell inside the Soviet occupation zone. Several masts came down by order of the military government, but the station itself was too useful to lose, and it went on broadcasting for East Germany for another four decades. The Central Tower survived the w...

Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Königs Wusterhausen radio transmitter: Mast 17

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The site was not cleared, which is the unusual part. Instead the Funkerberg became a museum of itself, with Senderhaus 1 preserved and the machinery left where it stood, and the surviving 210-metre mast — Mast 17 — kept as a technical monument and restored in 2009. Three squat 29...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 3.0 de