[GreenKeys] Continuing, nothing about Teletype art

[Jim Haynes]

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019, Paul Heller wrote:
> What he said! Yes. Please share. 

Well probably most of you know about this already but you can google for
"chad is our most important product" for a much longer memoir.

Bob Weitbrecht had a certain amount of resentment related to Irv Hoff.
For a long time the ARRL was rather negative about RTTY.  I think one
reason was that we used 850 Hz shift at the time and they thought this
was a waste of bandwidth in the CW portions of the bands to transmit
only 60 wpm.  And another reason was that they liked to publish 
construction articles that in principle one could build for himself;
with RTTY you had to have a Teletype machine and you couldn't just buy
one from your nearest radio parts store.

In any event we went to 170 Hz shift which reduced the bandwidth 
complaint, and ARRL started getting a lot of requests from the members
for more information on RTTY.  So Irv wrote a whole series of articles
that were quite popular and made it seem that he was the leading
RTTY expert on the planet.  Which obscured all the work Bob had done
years before when he promoted RTTY and couldn't get published in QST.

Bob stayed active in RTTY, but later was quite involved in Teletype
for the deaf community.  He invented a simple modem for use on telephone
lines that was used with surplus Teletype machines to communicate by
phone.  This became a big activity; deaf people were spending lots of
money on long-distance phone calls.  There was a particularly active
group in Kansas City that had something resembling a BBS except there
was no computer and it was all done by punched tape.

All this and more about Bob is written up in a book "A Phone of Our Own :
the Deaf Insurection against Ma Bell" by Harry G. Lang.  In those early
days the telephone company was opposed to the direction the deaf people
were going, in that AT&T was pushing ASCII over Baudot and also they
offered TWX service which in their view was exactly what the deaf people
needed.  But TWX was expensive and ASCII required new machines that the
deaf people could not afford.  Eventually the political landscape changed,
we got things like the Americans with Disabilities Act, and there was
official support for the TTD system that the deaf were using.  And of 
course now there are miniature terminals designed expressly for deaf
people to use.

Well Irv moved to the West Coast as W6FFC and continued his RTTY work
and publishing as well as being on the air all the time.  Not everyone
liked his domination of a particular frequency and developed what they
called a Flooded Frequency Computer (FFC) that would shut off the
Teletype whenever Irv was transmitting.  There was an autostart net on
3612.5 KHz.  Some jokester got the idea of starting up Irv's machine
and then sending a long transmission of line feed characters to run all
his paper out on the floor.  We worked out a modification of the Model 28
stunt box to counter that.  I don't remember now exactly how it worked,
but was something like install automatic carriage return and line feed,
disable the ordinary line feed, and require something following the
carriage return before a second CR would work.  So the machine would line
feed as a result of receiving a CR, and could not so easily be fooled
into running out all the paper.  I don't know if I still have a machine
with the stunt box arranged that way.

George Hutchison lived near Irv at that time, so the two of them did a
lot of work together before Irv died and George moved to Washington State.

While I was in Phoenix working for G.E. the Vietnam war was on.  Hams were
not allowed to handle third-party traffic, but the MARS organization was
not bound by that.  Barry Goldwater's home in Phoenix had a well-equipped
station operating on amateur and MARS frequencies.  There was a ham club
at G.E. and it supplied a whole team of operators to keep Barry's station
on the air, mostly handling phone patch traffic between the personnel in
Vietnam and their families in the States.  I was not on that team; I've
never been much of a voice operator, but I was invited to visit the 
station once and see it in operation.  Barry happened to be in residence
at the time.  Message traffic at the time was being handled by W7VKO
who had an elaborate RTTY station.  I wasn't part of that either, as his
station was way across town and maybe he didn't need any help; but I
did visit with him occasionally.

I had built an early version of my "diddler" circuit using RTL integrated
circuits, since they were cheap at the time.  The one time I tried to use
it the RF in the shack got into all the circuits and prevented it from
working.  When I left Phoenix I left the RTL stuff with Cecil W7VKO but
I don't know if he ever did anything with it.  The later model diddler
was built with TTL after it had become cheap.  I built my own transmitter
while I was in Phoenix.  I thought it was a design I had copied from a QST
article or ARRL handbook, but it seems rather to be a combination of that
rig and either my own or a copy of a different design for the VFO.  I used
that transmitter for several years until I was in California and Larry
WA6JYJ and I were dabbling in government surplus sales.  For quite a small
sum I bid on and got a seven-foot tall TMC transmitter with a KW linear
amplifier and an FSK exciter.  I tend to forget now that in those olden
days all us RTTY operators were running 500 watts or more in an effort
to get good copy.  That was my main transmitter until at last I bought
a modern radio, a Kenwood TS-940S.  The motivation for that was that
AMTOR had come into being and the TMC rig couldn't do transmit-receive
switching fast enough to work with it.

I also had acquired an ARC-65 set from a fellow MARS member.  This is
an airplane transceiver that had started out in life as the ARC-21,
an AM radio built by RCA and featuring frequency synthesis to get
a gazillion channels all over the HF spectrum.  Later when the Air
Force went to SSB most of the ARC-21s were converted by RCA to ARC-65s.
These were not good radios, in my opinion.  It seemed to take a lot
of maintenance to keep the -65 working.  I used it in AF MARS on a
voice network, but eventually got tired of trying to keep it running.
MARS also had a RTTY net, but I was never able to hear it, so in the
end they threw me out for non-participation.  This was long before the
Kenwood radio entered my life.

I put off getting any kind of PC for a long time.  I was working for
the computer center at UCSC and made use of a Unix time sharing system,
with first a Teletype 43 and later a CRT terminal at home so I could
keep an eye on things when I was not in the office.  I'm trying to 
remember now what got me into the PC field - I think it was when HAL
developed the Clover modem.  The original model of that was a PC board
that went into a PC (Printed Circuit - Personal Computer).  So I went
to the surplus store and picked up a used IBM PC-AT.  It was Larry
WA6JYJ (now W7JYJ) who twisted my arm to get me into Clover.  The
Clover modems use DSP in a dedicated DSP engine; the PC provided keyboard
and display and stored the firmware to be downloaded into the Clover
board.  Later they added Pactor and RTTY modem firmware to the setup
before abandoning the amateur market.  I also used the PC as a CRT 
terminal.

A few years later we were thinking about getting into Unix workstations
at the University, so I bought a 486 PC to try out and see if Linux
would be good enough for us to use (alongside Sun workstations that cost
a lot more).  In those days putting on Linux required loading something
like 30 floppy disks, followed by another 20 for the X-window system.
CD ROMs were still in the future.  While I was playing with that I read
about the K6STI RITTY software that did DSP right on the PC CPU.  As
I mentioned earlier I was really tickled with that idea, so I bought
his software right away.  Later as it developed it needed a Pentium
CPU, but nothing like the really fast ones we have today.  I kept using
that for RTTY until he pulled it off the market - well I kept on using
it, but there were no more improvements.  One time I asked K6STI if
he could also make his modem do PSK, and he told me that the PSK31
software that would run on a PC had just been released by G3PLX.

So I downloaded his PSK software and started using it.  For a while it
was just like the early days of RTTY - very few people using it so we
had a lot to talk about.  And I guess that was the beginning of the
slow death of RTTY, since PSK31 gives better copy with much lower power
and is free.  RTTY these days seems to be used only for contests and
DX.  My belief is that it is used for those because it offers
very quick turnaround and the high error rate doesn't matter.  In
contests and DX you mostly already know what the message is going to
be, so if it looks like what you think it is you call it good and
log the contact.