Kurier system

Kurier was an experimental burst transmission system tested from August 1944 by the Kriegsmarine for U-Boat communications. Having learned of the success of the UK's "huff-duff" systems in rapidly locating radio transmissions, Kurier was developed to dramatically reduce message transmission times from a typical 20 seconds to about 250 ms, and never longer than 450 ms (just under ½ a second). Due to the deteriorating position of Germany by that time, Kurier never became operational.

History

Kurier was a simple system largely consisting of the KZG 44/2, a metal drum with 85 small metal bars that could be pushed into two positions. A message was prepared using the Navy's kurzsignale encoding method that reduced messages to a short series of four-letter codes, and then encrypted using the Naval Enigma machine. Conventional transmission of the kurzsignale at this stage would take about 20 seconds, fast enough to defeat conventional radio direction finding, but not huff-duff. The resulting short message was converted into Morse code and entered onto the KZG 44/2, with dots as a single bar and dashes as two. A section of the drum was always pre-set as a series of dots to provide a timing signal. Once the message was encoded onto the drum, it was connected to the radio and activated. The drum rapidly rotated past a magnetic pickup; each of the bars created a pulse that was fed into the transmitter.

The burst started with a timing signal consisting of twenty-five 1-ms-long "dot" signals with a pause of equal length between dots, taking 97 ms to send. This was followed by a 20 ms pause. After this the message was sent, dots as a single 1 ms signal followed by a 3 ms pause, and dashes as a 1 ms signal, a 1 ms pause, another 1 ms signal, and then a 3 ms pause. The entire message could be encoded into not more than 85 pulses—depending upon the dots and dashes in the message—for a total of not more than 337 ms. The longest possible message was thus 97 + 20 + 337 = 454 ms, less than half a second.