[GreenKeys] What brought you here?

[hwhall at compuserve.com]

I entered ham radio as Novice while a Senior in high school. Had an advantage in that my Dad was a ham though not active at the time, so there were radios, parts and stuff around. When I went to college, I took some elective courses in the Industrial Arts Dept and it had a small ham club. A bunch of us caravanned to an FCC exam center and got licenses and upgrades and on the trip I made it from Novice to Advanced Class.
Sometime that year, the department made a pilgrimage to a surplus depot to scrounge stuff for the school. Among the things we hauled back was a complete Model 19 and a pile of Teletype bulletins & other stuff. Well, some of the club decided to try out RTTY so we cleaned up and tuned up the Model 19. We built a W2PAT TU from the ARRL Handbook and rigged up a station with a Navy TCS transmitter and receiver using keyed-diode FSK shift on the TX oscillator. Worked fine. That was my intro to Teletypes.
Sometime later, after graduating, I ended up with some Teletype parts from a hamfest and was refurbing them & assembling working machines on our apartment’s living room floor with the tolerance of my new bride. Don’t know where all of those went, now, but I did drag one Model 15 around for a long time while in the Air Force.
After a remote tour I returned with an itch to try home computing and obtained a MITS Altair 680b cheap from a fellow who was unable to make the teleprinter interface work. It looked to me like there was an error in the schematic, so I cobbled together a optoisolated loop interface of my own and had the Model 15 working with the 680b.
Well, eventually, a real IBM computer came along and the 680b went into storage and the Model 15 was donated to another ham as I had to shed a lot of mass for my last Air Force PCS move. I recently sold the 680b but here in retirement I’m working on putting together some WWII-looking TTY gear for a WWII aviation museum. Communications was a key to air war success and Teletype was a big part of communications. A bunch of the folks there are enthused about the idea. I’ve got a Model 15 sans table so far but hope to have a few machines on a local loop that visitors can interface with. And maybe, just maybe, I can interest them in a working WWII military radio station. With RTTY.
WayneWB4OGM
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