[GreenKeys] things

[Joe Stevens]

It just started snowing here in Kodiak Alaska.  I read some of Don's 
postings, N9TTY.  I really enjoyed them and it brings back a lot of 
memories of when I worked on the east coast for a telco.  Actually, 
before that, I worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and spent a 
wonderful 6 months in the teletype shop on the 5th floor of building 
510.  I was the only shop 67 electronics tech there, the rest were 
machinists from shop 35.  There was one very quiet older fellow who I 
later learned had been in the Bataan death march.  He was very 
patient teaching me a lot of stuff that I only figured out much later 
was very valuable.  Mostly they had me installing RFI filters in 
model 28 ASRs.  The radio section which I worked in later actually 
had a model 19 in the shack.  I would get on the air on HF or UHF and 
have QSOs with the other tech on board the ships in the yard just for 
testing.  This was with a URA-8 demod and a URC-32 
transceiver.  Later I was put in the shop that maintained all the 
shipyard's internal FM mobile radios and base stations.  I got into 
the WeCo strowger exchange they had in the shipyard occasionally to 
run jumpers on the mainframe for radio circuits.  Later in 1970 I got 
a call that there was a vacancy at the Norfolk and Carolina Telephone 
and Telegraph company in my home town.  As the shipyard was not as 
much fun as it had been, I jumped at the chance and became a 
Transmission Technician for this independent telco.  They had about 
25 or so exchanges in NC and VA.  I was one of two technicians the 
company had to maintain all their microwave, cable carrier and 
special circuits.  There was open wire with telegraph on it along 
with physical voice circuits.  You could hear the thumping noise on 
the voice circuits from the telegraph keying it's polar signal from 
one wire to ground.  We had WeCo O and H carrier, WeCo N1 and N2 
carrier and just about everything Lenkurt ever made.  Lenkurt 33, 45, 
46 ...  Lenkurt 45 on 74 radios.  Even one microwave hop with 
Panhandle X carrier serving subscribers.  There were several voice 
circuits that had multiple telegraphs on them.  VF-931 was one of the 
voice circuit numbers.  They normally fed the loop with +130 volts on 
one side and -48 on the other.  There was a 130 volt wet-cell battery 
bank in each exchange that had telegraph.  It was not nice when the 
installer hanging on the pole by his spikes in the rain came in 
contact with one of those telegraph pairs.  I spent a lot of time 
troubleshooting open-wire lines.  We had three crossarms going north 
for about 30 miles and one crossarm going south for about 45 
miles.  I used Murray, Varley and other tests I have forgotten now 
with a Wheatstone bridge.  I could often put the guy on the road 
within sight of the trouble.  When the company surplused their WeCo H 
carriers, K4VHV and I hooked up some filters to interconnect our home 
telephone pairs to each other above 7.5 KHz.  We had an H carrier 
circuit between our ham shacks.  Around this time, the telco being 
all rotary dial with Strowger switches, we decided to build a 
touch-tone autopatch on our two-meter repeater.  I designed and built 
a huge kluge of a contraption that stored DTMF digits on relays and 
then outpulsed them to telco.  Telco had no DTMF service.  Even our 
intertoll trunks to AT&T were dial pulse, most with SF 
signalling.  Even our EAS circuits had 4-wire E&M channels with 
external term sets.  Every circuit through the toll center was on 
jacks at every point.  2-wire jacks, 4-wire jacks and 6-wire 
jacks.  Racks and racks of jacks.  I made a recording of the last 
call on the O carrier on the open-wire line to the north.  It was me 
and the other tech cutting the circuits over.  During this time Al, 
K4VHV, and I were operating a Model 28 on the air.  We could melt 
RG-8 with the continuous duty transmitter.  We had a Drake L4 but it 
wasn't up to the task of RTTY.  We built a 4-1000 linear with a 
pole-pig hooked up backwards for the high-voltage supply.  We had to 
switch to RG-17 for the coax.  I don't know what the statute of 
limitations is on that, but we ran some power...  Those Drake T4X 
series of radios were very good for teletype as they had a terminal 
on the side of the VFO that you could attach a simple FSK 
circuit.  Tonight I have been working on my basement Strowger 
telephone exchange.  I've been trying to hook it up for the 
collectors net with Asterisk.  I have Asterisk working very well on 
several computers.  It's the interfacing of the computer to the 
electro-mechanical switching Strowgers that is giving me trouble.  I 
had everything working then the card in the computer quit.  It sure 
is easier to fix a model 15 than a computer...  At N&CT&T, we had an 
Automatic Electric SATT toll ticketing system for direct dial long 
distance billing.  It used a Kleinschmidt 6-lever paper punch if I 
remember correctly.  Later they switched it out for a 9-track 
magnetic tape drive.  I wish I had taken more pictures during that 
time.  Of the pictures that I have, a few are on my web pages 
http://www.kadiak.org/joe

Each email that comes across this list with remembrances like this 
gets stored here permanently and is valued very much.  I love to read 
them again and again. I really enjoy the WWII period of 
technology.  I get to explain to hordes of cruise-ship passengers 
what punched tape is for and why you would need it.  I have fun 
asking them what is the 5th power of two.  That is 2 states (binary) 
and 5 holes in the tape for 32 characters.  Many of our younger 
visitors have never even seen a typewriter!  We have several (never 
enough) manual typewriters out to play with.  We let them dial the 
phones on the Strowger switches and jam up all the keys on the manual 
typewriter by hammering all the keys at once.  They get a hell of a 
bang out of it all.  They can crank the old phones and scream in a 
very high squeal when somebody answers one of the other phones in the 
museum on the same magneto line.  I don't mind fixing this stuff at 
all.  It's important to let them experience it all 
themselves.  Museums behind glass cases turn me off. They can get in 
the 1945 jeep and try their best to break it.  It's Ok, we will fix 
it later.  There is one rule, they have to wear a military 
uniform.  We have a large rack of them for their use.  A 5th grade 
blonde girl in a sailor suit behind the wheel of the jeep is quite a 
sight.  There are a few 5th grade teachers here who bring their 
classes to the museum as close to December 7 as possible every 
year.  Our museum is a half-mile up a road that is not kept plowed in 
the winter.  They hike the whole lot of them into the park on foot if 
necessary, rain or shine.  Has anybody else tried to explain to a 5th 
grade class how a model 15 printer works?  Once in a while you get a 
really live one who asks really good questions.  That one student 
makes it all worthwhile.  It does concern me though, that I haven't 
been able to recruit a young person to learn how to continue 
this...  The high-schoolers that get interested leave for college and 
never come back.

Tomorrow morning, just about daylight, I will be tying up the M/V 
Kennicott at Pier 2.  Thus begins 6 straight days of ferry service 
for Kodiak then 8 days of no ferry while she runs to Prince Rupert 
BC.  Gotta earn some money to buy more boatanchors.

Don, thanks for making me remember.

Joe Stevens, WL7AML
Kodiak Military History Museum
http://www.kadiak.org

Alaska Marine Highway
http://www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs/