[RTTY] RTTY BBS's (was: WPX)

[Tim Shoppa]

Jeff AC0C writes:
> If you want to do your own thing, the world is definitely short of RTTY
> rag chewers on the bands.? Absent contest and dxpedition activity, it's
> hard to find a RTTY signal on the bands in the middle of the week...

I've had several nice RTTY Ragchew chats in the past year. Of course that's
not much compared to tens of thousands of contest QSO's!

>  [insert fond memories of the ASCII-character-pictures here...]

Ahem, Baudot character-pictures!

I first did RTTY back in the early 1980's while I was in high school. Built
my own TU's out of op-amps and Radio Shack 20% precision capacitors. In
other words lots of manual tweaking of the TU tuning pots was necessary!

The TU was either hooked either to my Apple II+ computer or (occasionally,
I didn't have infinite paper) my actual Teletype. I usually reserved the
paper for the best Baudot character-pictures HI HI.

Back then we did some paper tape Baudot-character pictures, but the hot
thing, was that there were several RTTY BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems),
with (among other things) Baudot character pictures, and ongoing "online
BBS discussions" of RTTY and other ham radio things. I cannot remember
their callsigns but from my QTH in Iowa, I remember one in Kentucky being
particularly prominent.

For the life of me I can't figure out how I *FOUND* the RTTY BBS's. They
couldn't be transmitting all the time, could they? Maybe I happened across
one by accident and saw (spelled out) the access rules/guidelines as
someone else was using it, or maybe a list of them in a ham magazine?

Then I went away to college and wasn't doing RTTY for a couple decades.

How long did the era of RTTY BBS's last? Was it just a couple years in the
80's, or do they still live on today?

Tim N3QE