[GreenKeys] ASR 33 question - stop bits?

[Frank Knutzen]

Hi Jeff and all,

You are, of course, correct Jeff. However, I feel compelled to come to the defense of the civilian MARS teletype operators. They were traffic handlers and took that job very seriously. Not unusual to send some of them 50 messages a day. But, virtually none had any teletype maintenance experience. If the black box teletype didn't work, many would just take it down to their military depot and just get another one and hope it worked better.

We took note of the worse offenders. Being in the Marine Corps, I had access to a high quality distortion analyzer. I spent many weekends at civilian stations fixing teletypes - usually just for room and board.

Even with a poor quality scope you should be able to adjust to no more than 10% bias distortion. A really good quality scope will get you in the 0 - 3% range. The receiving station, optimized range setting should copy at least 40% bias distortion OK - more if you manually optimize the setting for the received signal.

Best regards to all,

Frank  KF5EN

On 11/26/2018 10:23 PM, Jeffrey Angus wrote:
On 11/26/18 9:24 PM, Frank Knutzen wrote:
As a MARS operator, that didn't always work as
many of the civilian stations we worked had a lot
of distortion on their signals. So while they were
sending their "quick brown fox" we would often
open the machine and adjust the range finder on
the fly to get good copy. Had to do both printer
and reperf so it was sometimes a real race.
Unfortunately, Hams are notorious for the "close enough is good
enough" method of operating. It's traditional. There was an article
in the May 1947 QST, "Relax, men! Use haywire." After throwing
together a rig using some truly awful construction methods, when
the results are less that stellar, the explanation is "Guess the band
conditions are terrible." Because you know, it couldn't possibly be
due to the way the rig as put together.

I've been doing RTTY for the past 45 years of the 50 that I've been
licensed. I've seen and heard some truly awful setups.

Jeff


--
"I am a river to my people."
Jeff-1.0
WA6FWI
www.foxsmercantile.com<http://www.foxsmercantile.com>




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