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

[kn7sfz]

 >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?

Hi Tim,

I ran a RTTY BBS until about 1991.  I used a Commodore C64 and the BBS 
program was on a a floppy.  The radio was a barefoot TS-120 xtal 
controlled on 3624.

There is a pic of the radio on my QRZ page.

Those were fun days!

Richard kn7sfz




On 2/13/2018 7:43 AM, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> 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
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