[OKDXA] While You Were Shooting Skips...

[AC5UP]

WORLDBEAT - UK:  A COLOSSUS CODE BREAKING EVENT

To celebrate the completion of the British-built
World War 2 decrypting machine called the
Colossus Mark 2,  there will be an on the air ham
radio operating event on November 15th and
16th.  And in this one the challenge is truly complex. 

Here's how it goes:

A series of messages will be enciphered on a
World War 2 Lorenz cipher machine.  They will
then be transmitted using  six tone RTTY from the
Heinz Nixdorf Computer Museum in Paderborn,
Germany.  The challenge is for anyone to break
the cipher settings and decipher these messages
before the rebuilt Colossus Mark  2 at  Bletchley
Park in the United Kingdom does it.

The Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society which is
based at Bletchley Park has already been involved
in making test transmissions with the Heinz
Nixdorf Computer Museum.  The actual frequencies,
tones for Mark are  900, 1620 and 2340
hertz.  For Space they are  540, 1260 and 1980
hertz.  At airtime the operating frequencies for
the event have not been announced.

Bletchley Park is the historic site of secret
British code breaking activities during World War
Two and the birthplace of the modern
computer.  More is on-line at
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/cevent.ht   

(Southgate, GB2RS)