[GCARC] Decoding RTTY from a Star Trek movie

[Jonathan Pearce]

Some of you may have seen this already, but for others it may be interesting. This is the story of how N4HY (a packet radio and ham satellite pioneer and certified genius, as well as a friendly approachable guy) used a Cray supercomputer back in 1989 to decode what he thought was a ham RTTY transmission that showed up on Checkov's communicator when he was on the "nuclear wessel" in Star Trek 4. It shows how hams are willing to use ridiculous levels of technology to solve trivial problems.

https://swling.com/blog/2016/01/how-bob-mcgwier-used-a-cray-2-supercomputer-to-decode-a-ham-radio-transmission-heard-in-star-trek-iv/

Also, for those of us who are "a little older", here's a "Space Cowboys<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186566/>" story of KA9Q's involvement in decoding the telemetry of the ISEE3 satellite. It was launched in 1978 using technology from that era and several years ago a group of amateurs tried to connect with it, but those guys didn't understand the 70s technology used for the telemetry. So they contacted Phil, who's in his 60s and had worked with the stuff, to write a decoder for them.  Pretty interesting story.  http://www.cqdx.ru/ham/ham_radio/ka9q-on-rebooting-isee3/

This is the kind of stuff that the newly-named GCARC "skunkworks" group (K2QA, K2ZA, N3PUU, KD2RPE and me) has been doing down at the west end of the clubhouse. We're trying to apply technology to do stuff that may not have a strong practical application but the development journey is really fun. It's why we built the GOES weather satellite receiver, the Fox ham satellite telemetry receiver, the SatNOGS station to transmit satellite telemetry to a central warehouse, the new APRS station that transmits real-time weather from clubhouse weather station, and are working on an additional Lindenblad antenna that will allow APRS communication with the ISS and other ham satellites that support APRS. If you're out for Field Day, stop in and take a look.

73 de Jon WB2MNF