The following is from Bill, W9EDE, who was one of my Elmers when I was
14 years old. He sent this to me yesterday and I had no idea he was involved
with teletype. As a RTTY enthusiast, I found it interesting reading as it could
possibly be the first air-to-ground RTTY operation.
>
> In 1941, I was working for Indiana Bell as a teletype repairman. I came
> back to that Job after WWll and shortly after was promoted to Engineer,
> designing telegraph circuits and teletypewriter applications. Early in the
> 1950s, before you were born, there was an International Conference of
> telephone people here in Indianapolis to resolve some of the problems of
> providing telephone circuits for Business Machines. Teletype Corp and Bell
> Laboratories got together and developed a demonstration of air to ground
> communications using teletypewriters, data sets, and radios. The airborne
> unit was a Model 30 Teletype, a very small unit that printed on tape. I
> was delegated to work with the Teletype and Labs people for any local
> assistance they may have needed. The ground station was a model 19 TTY,
> operated by one of our training ladies. They would take a few people at a
> time for a short flight and let them pass small talk back and forth. It
> worked fine until they had a load of South Americans who spoke Spanish.
> Our operator threw up her hands, but a couple of us saved the day by
> remembering enough of our High School Spanish to pass the time of day. So
> far as I know, that was the first air/ground RTTY contact.
>
> Back in those days we had a lot of open wire, and it was a real challenge
> to keep 40 WPM TTY circuits working. The scientists at Bell Labs told us
> that the maximum theoretical speed on a local loop was 30Kbaud, and then
> only under ideal noise conditions. How wrong they were.
>
73, Don AA5AU
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