[GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal

[Ralph Mowery]

One thing you may want to do is look for a sound card program such as MMTTY. 
This will send the audio tones out to the speaker port of the laptop.  Then 
you can build a simple audio to loop converter.  This will not have to be a 
very good one as you will be driving pure audio tones out of the computer.

I thought someone on here published a simple one a while back.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Haynes" <jhhaynes at earthlink.net>
To: <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 5:29 PM
Subject: [GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal


> Sometimes I've wished for a portable Baudot terminal to use in testing
> TTY gear.
>
> I have an old Dell C610 laptop and those are dirt cheap on ebay, and have 
> a COM port.  There are some old DOS programs that make a PC into a "glass 
> TTY" and are still available.  One I have used is called rtty12g - you can 
> google for it.
>
> Now the trouble is that the laptop has Windows XP, and while rtty12g will
> run under Windows XP it doesn't do the right thing.  Specifically it
> doesn't set the UART to 5 bit characters; it sets the baud rate correctly
> but sends 8 bit characters.  I guess in DOS the program can poke the
> UART registers directly to get the desired properties.
>
> So one solution would be if someone knows how to set the UART to 5 bits
> in Windows XP and later.
>
> A rather grubby way I have working now is that I have a floppy drive on
> the laptop.  I formatted a floppy on a Win98 machine, then copied the
> rtty12g files to it, and boot from the floppy.  This works, but I wouldn't
> suggest to anybody to go through that process.
>
> Another possibility is to create a partition on the hard drive in the
> laptop and install FreeDOS and rtty12g.  Right now I don't know enough
> about how to install just enough of FreeDOS and make it bootable along
> with the other stuff on the laptop (WinXP and Linux).  I'm assuming
> FreeDOS would let the program do what it wants to do to the hardware
> registers.
>
> Jim W6JVE
>