[GreenKeys] What brought you here?

[Duncan Brown]

Been very interesting reading everyone's stories!

Mine started when I was about 8-10 years old. I was spending summers at 
my grandmother's. In the town hall lobby, there were two M15 ROs - one 
of AP & the other UPI.  I remember being intrigued by those machines. 
About ten years later (1966), I enlisted in the Army. I had been a ham 
for 8 years and figured that they make me a radio operator or repairman. 
But then they sent me to Teletypewriter Repair School, which was 
something I knew nothing about and didn't considered my self very 
mechanical. The Southeastern Signal Corps School covered the M15 (which 
the Army was phasing out) and the Kleinschmidt TT-4, TT-98, TT-76, 
AN/FGC-25. I was in the Army Security Agency, and we also had a separate 
school on the M28 and Mite.

My first duty station was Viet Nam, where I helped keep the company's 
TT-4s, TT-76s & TT-98s running. We had 3 AN/GRC-46 and 1 AN/GRC-26 radio 
teletype vans. If we had an extra printer, converter & radio available 
we would set them up to copy a very strong RTTY signal on 14.9 Mhz; it 
was AP or UPI from the Philippines.  It was interesting to be listening 
to the local AFRTS radio and hear them read the news word for word what 
we had seen print on a TT-98 a half-hour earlier. There was lots of 
commercial RTTY in SE Asia. I remember copying a station from Saigon 
sending anglicized Japanese. Also DHZ, Peking, the Hinhua News Agency, 
which, in  its channel markers along with two rows of RYs, included 
quotes from Chairman Mao.

  I soon found that I knew as much radio (from my ham experience) as the 
Army-trained radio repairmen, so I worked on radios in my spare time. 
When I got back to the US from Viet Nam, I got my MOS changed to a radio 
repairman. At Ft Bragg, NC we had a transportable field station with 
lots of R-390s that I got to know well. There were Kleinschmidts in the 
comm center, but there were also at least four M28 RO monitor units 
connected up to R-390s and AN/FRA-86s which were FSK converters that 
could demodulate four tones ("DFSK") for two printers.  I guess the M28s 
were used for the monitor positions because the type box could be easily 
changed for different alphabets. These monitor positions were not used 
much and I used to tune around to try to find something to print, but 
there was very little to copy compared to SE Asia. The only station I 
remember copying was WBR70 which was a weather station out of Miami.

After I got out of the Army in 1970, I worked in various radio 
companies, but didn't do anything with TTYS. In 2000, I retired and 
joined the staff of the Antique Wireless Museum to keep my hand in 
radios. I soon found that the Museum had all the components of the 
AN/GRC-46 RTTY hut (TT-98, TT-76, T-195, R-392, MD-203 & CV-278) that I 
had worked on in Viet Nam. No one else in the Museum knew anything about 
them, so I set them up on a bench and was able to get them all hooked up 
and working and made a couple of contacts.  Since then, I've managed to 
expand the Museum's TTY collection to at least 30 different models from 
a dozen different manufacturers.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htAXaia-_aU for some of them.

It really surprises visitors to the Museum to find that  our modern 
digital communications stretch back to the 1880s and the mechanical TTY 
was the core of it for 100 years.

Thanks to everyone for keeping this technology alive!

Duncan Brown, K2OEQ
USASA    31J30

Antique Wireless Assoc. Museum,
   Asst. Curator, Commercial Equipment
(also chief TTY op & repairman)

www.antiquewireless.org