Radiofax
On 12 August 1931 this system successfully transmitted a copy of the Union-Star newspaper of Schenectady, New York to the transatlantic liners America and Minnekahda.
Sensing a new and potentially golden opportunity, competitors soon entered the field, but the printer and special paper were expensive luxuries, AM radio transmission was very slow and vulnerable to static, and the newspaper was too small.
After more than ten years of repeated attempts by Finch and others to establish such a service as a viable business, the public, apparently quite content with its cheaper and much more substantial home-delivered daily newspapers, and with conventional spoken radio bulletins to provide any "hot" news, still showed only a passing curiosity about the new medium.
The major news agencies (AP, UPI, Reuters), maintained their own transoceanic radio facsimile transmitters as close to the action as they could.
The iconic flag raising on Iwo Jima was printed in hundreds of American newspapers within a day of being taken, because it was transmitted from Guam to New York City by wireless radiofacsimile, a distance of 12,781 km (7,942 mi).
[5][better source needed] By the late 1940s, radiofax receivers were sufficiently miniaturized to be fitted beneath the dashboard of Western Union's "Telecar" telegram delivery vehicles.
Facsimile machines were used in the 1950s to transmit weather charts across the United States via land-lines first and then internationally via HF radio.
Today radiofax data is available via FTP downloads from sites in the Internet such as the ones hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
A value known as the index of cooperation (IOC) must also be known to decode a radio fax transmission - this governs the image resolution, and derives from early radio fax machines which used drum readers, and is the product of the total line length and the number of lines per unit length (known sometimes as the factor of cooperation), divided by π.
After Hurricane Katrina damaged NMG, the Boston Coast Guard station NMF added a limited schedule of tropical warning charts.
All other products come from the Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) of the NWS, in cooperation with several other offices depending on the region and nature of information.
Kyodo has a dedicated transmission to Pacific fishing fleets from Kagoshima Prefectural Fishery Radio, and a relay from 9VF/252, which is said to be located in Singapore.
