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← UK Hand
Grid-based manual cipher system
- this page is a stub
BATCO is a paper-based hand-held manual cipher system, introduced in the British
Army in the early 1980s as a replacement for the ageing
SLIDEX system
that had been in use since WWII. The system consists of a set of
vocabulary cards and cipher sheets for superencipherment of
numeric code words.
BATCO is short for Battle Code
and was in use as a backup system until 2016, not only in the British Army,
but also by the Armies of other NATO countries such as the Netherlands.
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The BATCO system consists of a green plastic wallet that can be hung from
the neck of the user by means of a black cord. When closed, the 370 gram
wallet measures 215 x 145 x 20 mm.
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Occasionally, BATCO wallets can be found on auction sites like eBay, but
in most cases, they come without the original cards and without
their plastic sleeves. But even if the original plastic sleeves are still
present, it might be wise to replace them anyway, as they contain chlorine.
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As a result, the toner of the printed cards may stick to the inside of
the plastic sleeves and leave a permanent imprint when removed. This imprint
may then be transferred to new cards that are inserted. According to
German collector Karsten Hansky [2], a good replacement sleeve is:
Lindner 885P Schutzhüllen 190 x 130 mm
Two holes should be punched with a regular office puncher (standard
distance op 80 mm) after which the edge (close to the holes) should be
cropped by 2 mm, so that the pages can be turned without binding.
These sleeves may be available on eBay (use the above text in your search).
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- Wikipedia, BATCO
Retrieved April 2016.
- Karsten Hansky, Complete BATCO unit and scans of all cards
Received December 2019.
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Saturday 23 April 2016. Last changed: Friday, 13 December 2019 - 10:13 CET.
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