[GreenKeys] rtty 101

[Don Robert House]

Gil,

When George was broadcasting I had pretty good luck receiving him 
with a USN surplus R-1051B and a surplus 23 foot HF whip antenna made 
by the Shakespear company.  I also used an interesting antenna that 
(if I remember correctly) is called a "Cliff Dweller"... It has a 
center feed and two "slinkees" that pull out from the center feed. 
This way you get about 45 feet of dipole antenna in about 21 feet of 
space.  We have it mounted in the lab at Excelsus.  Next time I am 
there I will get the information off of it.  Regardless of what you 
wind up using, one of the most important things is to match the 
receiver circuitry to the antenna.

I hope George gets FCC permission to broadcast again.  It was a real 
BLAST FROM THE PAST...

Don
"Keeper of Foofy, the Chad maiden"



>    Gil Smith writes:
>
>>The antenna is my immediate concern, as I am now in a position to provide
>>for it on an old house we are remodeling for our business.  So this
>>brings up a few questions:
>
>
>   Hi Gil...  here in NorCal, I do a lot of RTTY work using my Ham gear, a
>Kenwood TS-430S and a 40' dipole in the attic. The antenna's too short and
>too close to the ground (15') but I'm renting and that's what I can do
>right now.  I'm limited to 20 meters and above for transmitting.  For
>recieiving, especially for SWL-type activities, I also use an Icom
>PCR-1000 'brick' radio (200Khtz to 1.3 Ghtz) and a discone type antenna.
>For RTTY, I generally use TrueTTY (www.dxsoft.com), or I crank up my Model
>19 and use a Dovetron as the Terminal Unit.  I have found that the right
>discone works well for broad-band reception, though they naturally tend to
>favor VHF...  with a sensitive reciever they offer a good trade-off
>between performance and 'real estate'.
>
>   As Jack has intimated, there is precious little unencrypted RTTY around
>anymore...  when I lived in India, I could often get the Australian Navy
>conducting exercise traffic, and there are sometimes press and marine
>traffic to be heard...  of course there are still some Ham signals from
>folks like me who stubbornly cling to anachronistic and pre-historic modes
>of long-gone communications, clogging up precious bandwidth with our
>annoying deedle-deedle spam....    but I digress.   ;}
>
>   Signals *are* out there, it just takes research and patience.
>Soundcard-based decoding programs for PCs or Macs are very helpful when it
>comes to snooping out such traffic, since a lot of them offer
>sophisticated signal analysis and display components.
>
>
>   Write me privately if I can be of more help...
>
>   Cheers
>
>John  KB6SCO
>
>
>
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-- 
--------------------------------------------------------
Don Robert House
North American Data Communications Museum
URL: http://www.nadcomm.org
Computer Museum of America
URL: http://www.computer-museum.org