The RTTY system was run at the VOA C Site location. The machines were M28s from pretty day one
in 1962 or so until about 1987 or thereabouts, when we replaced the M28s with Extel units.
I am going from memory, but I remember we had four M28s in the comm room, three were ASRs and one
was a KSR, all floor models.
Looking left to right along that wall, was a Telex machine, most probably M32, five level with a tape punch
and tape reader.
Next was an M28ASR which was our Greenville to Washington system. I am thinking it punched tape for
the outgoing RTTY message feed the next morning. Our HF RTTY feed was about 3.5 hours, 30 minutes to Liberia,
Munich, Kavala, Rhodes and Tangier and about 15 minutes with Botswana.
That circuit from Washington had a mix of traffic, so the evening shift operator would take the various messages
and punch a master send tape, one for each station, so the morning TTY operator did not have to determine what
traffic needed to be in the morning outgoing schedule.
I think we used the far right M28ASR for the outgoing traffic, using the TD on the M28ASR for sending the type, and the
confusing part for me is that the machine read that tape, but the M28ASR also punched the tape for the incoming traffic
from the overseas stations.
We used FAXFAX for the start code and NNNN to end, but as I recall only FAX was necessary to start the type puncher
and NNN would stop.
We also used chadless tape, so when we got the end of a message, we'd pull the tape out, by a foot or so, to separate
the incoming messages, for sending to Washington later in the tape.
On a good propagation day, we'd have little to clean up. On a bad propagation day, we'd have to have the overseas station
send traffic multiple times. Every now and then Greenville would have to repeat messages, but considering our transmitters
had more power than the overseas stations, it wasn't that often.
Writing this reminded me of a story in the conversion to the Extel units. Billy-Bob Cope had fixed up an electronic
keyer which alternated R and Y but with maybe ten to twenty rubouts, so that we could keep the transmit circuit off idle,
but not fill up the far end with rolls of RYs. When we converted to the Extel units, we found that this test keyer circuit
would fill up the transmit memory on the Extels so, we have to bypass the Extel for the test "tape" idle circuit keyer.
When I was at Greenville, we were using a Northern Radio Type 153 keyer, probably the Model 1 and for the tone
decoder, the Type 174 Model 1.
73
Sheldon