[GreenKeys] Under 40?! Call out for age...

[Duncan Brown]

I'm 71 and am more of an electronics type than mechanical. I was first 
exposed to a TTY when I was about 8-10 years old and spent the summers 
at my grandmother's. In the lobby of the town hall nearby were two M15 
ROs - one AP & the other UPI. I remember being intrigued by them 
"magically" typing out the news.  I didn't see another TTY until I went 
into the Army in 1966. At that point, I had been a ham for 8 years and 
the Army recruiter said that I could be a "Morse Intercept"  since I 
already knew the code.  But then they sent me to TTY Repair School at 
Ft. Gordon, GA. There we learned the Teletype Corp., M14 & 15 & AN/TGC-1 
tape relay equipment and the Kleinschmidt TT-4, TT-76-,TT-98, & 
AN/FGC-25. I was in the Army Security Agency and was then sent to 
additional training on the M28 and the Mite. I spent my year in Viet-Nam 
keeping TT-4s & TT-76s running.  I found that I knew as much about 
radios as the Army-trained radio repairmen, and worked on R-390s & 
R-392s in my spare time.

After the service, I worked in electronic communications design and did 
very little with TTY, although I had a M26 for a while and built a very 
simple, 4 tube, "pulse-counter" FSK converter (no selectivity). When I 
retired in 2000, I started volunteering at the Antique Wireless Assoc. 
Museum (to keep active in radio) and found that they had all the 
components of an AN/GRC-46B RTTY system and no one at the Museum knew 
anything about it.  I had worked on them in RVN, so I took it upon 
myself to get it hooked up and operational.

Since then, I have grown the Museum's TTY collection to over 30 
different machines from at least 10 different manufacturers.  The oldest 
being a c1900 French machine patterned after Emil Baudot's original 
5-key keyboard & tape printer used in multiplex systems.  if you are 
ever in upstate New York, come visit the AWA Museum.

Duncan Brown, K2OEQ
USASA  31J30

Antique Wireless Association Museum Asst. Curator, Commercial Equipment
(also Chief TTY operator & repairman)
http://www.antiquewireless.org/



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