[GreenKeys] reperf turn on/off

[Sheldon Daitch]

Steve,  
Way back when Voice of America had the RTTY traffic schedules, pre-email days, we used FAXFAX for the start convention and NNNN for the end of message for the punched tape traffic.

At least that is what was in the typed information.  I think the tape punch actually started on FAX, but by sending it twice, we had a bit of redundancy.
As for the tape punch stop, I think it was actually coded for three NNNs, but having four of them was a bit more reliable to stop the tape punching.

As our Greenville TTY operation was totally manual, we didn't need to be able to read the tapes for destination, for our network distribution wasfairly small.  

When we were handling message traffic, the NNNN did stop the tape punch.  All of the tape punches were chadless, and our operating procedurewas to pull about a foot or so of blank tape out of the punch, so we had plenty of blank tape between incoming messages.  Our procedures for our incoming traffic from overseas was to clean up the messages and we had an extra M-28ASR which was used to repunch the incoming trafficand clean up the errors.  Some days, we had really good HF propagation and we'd have all the DC bound traffic cleaned up almost by the end ofthe RTTY schedule, some days, it would be two or three hours before we had all the traffic cleaned up and sent to DC.  Propagation and volume.
73Sheldon
      From: Steve Garrison <steve.n4tty at gmail.com>
 To: Ken Stritzel <stritzel at svs.com> 
Cc: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
 Sent: Monday, February 25, 2019 3:22 PM
 Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] reperf turn on/off
   
I thought the sequences ZCZC and NNNN were just used to indicate the beginning and ends of messages since the "hole" patterns were easily recognizable by the "tape apes" having to handle all the tape messages.  I don't recall any of the machines that I worked on turning on with ZCZC and off with NNNN.  At least in the comm centers I supported.  Although that number was rather small when compared to all the comm centers in all branches of the military back in the mid 60s!

Steve G./N4TTY
Sent from my iPhone

   
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