[GreenKeys] news wire photos

[pacquerat at comcast.net]

Lee K9WRU said, 

Ya know, I'm beginning to suspect that I'm the only reader of this reflector 
who has actually hands on sent and received one of these old fax images. 
If you push me much harder I might even have to take a few photos of my 
efforts of 40 years ago! 

Lee K9WRU


Ummm, Not so Lee!

40 years ago I had gotten several Western-Union "DeskFax" machines. Following some of the modifications as described in a QST article I made their conversions and incorporated my own. I resolved the synchronizing issue so that scanning of both the transmitter and receiver would create a received document that was not split in half. I used the machines on 6-meters locally, when summer sporadic E- came I sent several transmissions to the west from my QTH in S. Eastern MA and they were received, not by a Ham but a short-wave enthusiast listening on 6 with a W-E DeskFax online. He sent me a copy by usps mail of my "CQ" transmission and I was most impressed. That was the last summer I had a complete station set-up. I had to move to my current location and raise my family. My hobbies took a back seat until my retirement two years ago... The DeskFax machine and the Lafayette HA-460 are still in the attic, along with all of the supplies.


FWIW: Line drawings worked very well with the "spark" paper that "W-E" used.

I found someone who has set up a web page on these machines:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/deskfax/index.html#service

Best!

Charles

WA1JFD