[GreenKeys] Early RTTY

[Paula Hutchison]

GreenKeyers - - - 

 

One of the early pioneers of RTTY was D. Reginald Tibbetts. His original
call was W6XY (now held by Ron Ott) and last call was W6ITH. 

 

Reg was one of those who knew his stuff, and did a lot of pioneering in
radio. He was known to have arguments with David Sarnoff, in which he quite
often prevailed.

 

One of his latter day achievements was to be appointed as sort of a
technical manager/vice-president of UPI.

 

His 400 acres southeast of Oakland, California, was a nest of rhombics,
Sterba curtains, and other electrical paraphernalia dedicated to the
reception and transmission of news between Asia and the US. 

 

He was well aware of the advantages of FSK versus on-off keying for
teletype.

 

He once provoked the FCC by setting up two transmitters, with a separation
of 850 cycles, and ran them in tandem. One transmitter was the MARK
transmitter, and the other was the SPACE transmitter. Perfectly legal in
that each transmitter was alternately on-off keyed, and I don't believe
there was a specification when it came to on-off keying of teletype. It
worked very well and I believe helped in the FCC's decision to allow FSK.

 

The FCC would almost routinely send him pink slips. He would investigate and
contact them, and the typical response would be something to the effect that
"We are measuring you with our General Radio Mark 17 Superblankety-Blank
frequency teller, and you are off by such and such.

 

He would respond by informing them he was setting up using a General Radio
Mark18 Ultra Superblankety-blank frequency teller, and YOURS needs to be
calibrated.

 

Ultimately they would leave him alone. 

 

He did very well in the radio field. When the San Francisco-Oakland Bay
Bridge was under construction, he had the contract to supply the radio
communications equipment to the construction people. 

 

Imagine having around 500 5-meter transceivers and the income from the
leases for those units, this being back from maybe 1934 to the end of
construction of the bridge.

 

Imagine having to meet the FCC requirement that each transceiver had to be
retuned every morning prior to the day's use.

 

Imagine having collected 5 dollars per day re-tuning fee per transceiver,
for that period of time.

 

Imagine owning two houses on St. Martin's Island, one on the French side and
one on the Dutch side.

 

My-Oh-My..

 

W7TTY/ITTY NEWS

 

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