Are digital modes practical for prepping?

[KC9TNH]

The ride/run officials were delighted to have a hard copy of who was where but man-oh-man, those Model 28 Teletypes were a stinker to heft up into the Jeep and unload at a horse barn in Front Royal.  After the race, do it all over again, in reverse.



73 de Luck, WA4STO
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[HGWells]Oh my. Those things may have been regarded as the apex of TTY design, but they were a complete pain to actually use. From someone who used to jam up the 100wpm gears on a Kleinschmidt, the keys on those 28's were shaped like obnoxious push-buttons, nothing really tactile about them. How these empowered ladies of the period managed that with the fingernails of the day is beyond me.[/exiting Rod Taylor's time machine]

[RadioRay]

THAT picture is a blast from the past!  I actually used to copy Morse code on a teletype, whether ASR or KSR I cannot recall, but it was a model 28 - Kleinschmidt without the re-perf.  The keys were indeed pushbuttons with all the tactile response of the push button on a 1960 car door. Add to that the fact that you had SHIFT and UNSHIFT buttons to press to switch between letters and numbers/punctuation and you get the picture of what it was like to copy fast, mixed letter/number cipher traffic send by some Siberian conscript, high on Russian Partizanka cigarrettes and chai and or vodka, depending upon how long it has been since his last pay/booze allowance. They were'nt paid much, so they were known to drink MUCH to make-up the difference. Some of their transmitters were drift-o-maits, so I'd have to copy with one hand, while the other hand was on the knob of my beloved R-390A, tracking them as they chirpped and drifted.

>>>  THIS is why I am so jazzed about Direct Digital Synthesis - always on freq, no chirp or drift and palmtop computers that hold entire DEPARTMENTS full o of teletype capabilities ON STEROIDS!  Being able to park a radio on a WINMOR freq and have 'mostly private' e-mail over radio non-real-time is a good thing.

Enough of the good old/bad old days.  The nurse is coming down the hall with my meds and she gets angry when I am caught using the staff computer to talk to those outside of the assylum. . .    :P


>de RadioRay ..._ ._

[madball13]

think it would be possible to digitize a list of racers and send it by PSK versus calling all the names out individually.

Heh, back in 1979, I did just that.  It was the first year for the hams to support the 24 hour horse riding and human running race through the mountains of Shenandoah, Page, and Frederick counties in Virginia.

Was it digital back then?  You bet.  RTTY. 

The ride/run officials were delighted to have a hard copy of who was where but man-oh-man, those Model 28 Teletypes were a stinker to heft up into the Jeep and unload at a horse barn in Front Royal.  After the race, do it all over again, in reverse.



The one thing we couldn't guarantee back then was accuracy of transmission.  Today, with Winmor and certain of the NBEMS modes, we can do that.

73 de Luck, WA4STO

You just dated yourself. Were you able to run that mobile?  ;D

[WA4STO]

THAT picture is a blast from the past!  I actually used to copy Morse code on a teletype,

I remember a Model 28 - related "fun" time I had in the late 70s:

1.  With the help of two strong friends, we hefted a 28ASR up to a dorm room at the U. of VA on Valentine's day.  A bunch of the students (some hams) had a booth set up (lots of red hearts displayed around it) and accepted radiograms in the dining hall.

They'd run back to the dorm room with NTS radiogram forms in hand.

For some strange reason, I've always been an extremely fast typist.  So I had them read each radiogram to me, and I "poked" 'em all into the 28, made 5-level paper tapes of them, and later spit them out on 80 meter RTTY to the waiting NTS troops.

I learned one important thing about young people and radiograms:  They just LOVE to say "Happy VD" to all their friends.  Or maybe it was ex-friends, dunno.

73 de Luck, WA4STO

[WA4STO]

what it was like to copy fast, mixed letter/number cipher traffic send by some Siberian conscript, high on Russian Partizanka cigarrettes and chai and or vodka, depending upon how long it has been since his last pay/booze allowance. They were'nt paid much, so they were known to drink MUCH to make-up the difference. Some of their transmitters were drift-o-maits, so I'd have to copy with one hand, while the other hand was on the knob of my beloved R-390A, tracking them as they chirpped and drifted.

dih DAR dit THAT! 

I couldn't imagine using a TTY machine to copy Cyrillic cipher text; I mean whaddya do about those "extra" characters?  what happens when "dih dah di dar" comes across your cans?

In Morse incercept school (Pensacola), we had a bunch of R390s at the end of the schooling to practice tuning, but the copy was only on typewriters, specially modified to let you nail those extra characters.  Oh, and they were sturdy enough to allow for young Marine teens, right out of boot camp (wanting to kill, kill, kill, but stuck in Morse training?  Geez!) to throw them at the Chief CT running the class. 

Then at the super-secret Naval Security Group base outside of D.C. (so secret that it didn't have any guards at the gate) we also used  Cyrillic mills.

Fun times.  right.

73 de Luck, WA4STO

[KC9TNH]

...drift-o-maits...
>de RadioRay ..._ ._

;D  They're still out there; on 40m, as heard in the middle of the night over the weekend, SKCC sprint? (Someone should take that circuit off the internet and donate their 6V6 tubes to a guy who refurbishes old Fender Princeton amps.)

And while Ray's getting his meds & chasing the nurse, oh-dark-thirty over the weekend I found a reliable enough relay to become the 10th to put in my RMS Express favorites. And reflected that the worst I've seen thus far in terms of drift is a relatively microscopic Sixteen Point Seven Hertz. On 40m this effort has been awhile coming along because of the diff between our band plan and my friends just to the north, who have a wonderful time on LSB SSB in what we think of as "our" CW & digital area. But at least, from my location, I have some relays near & far, 80-17, and if they don't work, the bandS be broke.

Did manage to get some reading done while listening on a couple of QRP areas. Murphy was still around, because as gil knows, our band plan ain't their band plan (whoever they is), and there seemed to be alot of +20 DX signals coming in from the other side of the fence, Bulgaria was one, can't remember the other but they all make distilled beverages out of potatoes.
8)

Need to get through the holidays so I can reset my body clock.  Arggh.

[cockpitbob]

OK, I'm in.  I just ordered my Christmas present.  A Signalink USB with cable for my FT-857. 

I'm really itching to play with Winmore.  My 14 year old son has his General but hasn't done much.  I think digital modes will be enough like texting and emailing that it could get him back into the hobby.  Also, on my bucket list is EME and most people seem to be using digital modes because of their ability to work incredibly weak signals.

Just got my 817 hooked up to the computer for PSK. After lots of frustration i was able to figure it out. Recently during an EMCOM meeting at my club the president showcased the possibilities of using digital modes over the repeater. There are a lots of digital modes and they all seem to have there benefit based on data you want to transmit. PSK125 ( ??? ) for example uses a higher bandwidth but can get a lot of data transmitted in a short amount of time. My club supports lots of local activities like races and think it would be possible to digitize a list of racers and send it by PSK versus calling all the names out individually.

So, now that all the relatives have gone I can start playing with my new SignaLink USB.  For Winmor it looks like RMSexpress is what I should set-up.  What communication SW do most people use for the PSK modes?

[WA4STO]

For PSK (and just about everything else, aside from JT65 and WINMOR) the majority of us dweebs seem to float to the top with FLDIGI.

You can grok it at: 

http://www.w1hkj.com/download.html <-- look closely for the help file over on the right.

73 de Luck, WA4STO
Stuck in the cornfields of Nebraska

[cockpitbob]

For PSK (and just about everything else, aside from JT65 and WINMOR) the majority of us dweebs seem to float to the top with FLDIGI.

You can grok it at: 

http://www.w1hkj.com/download.html <-- look closely for the help file over on the right.

73 de Luck, WA4STO
Stuck in the cornfields of Nebraska

Luck, thanks.  FLdigi rings a strong bell, so it must be popular enough to have stuck in my leaky brain.  I'll go with that.

Been working my ass off around the house since all the relatives left.  As of now I'm "off duty".  I have the rig re-located to the living room, in front of the TV and close to the fridge, with an Rx only antenna strung around the room and over the Christmas tree.  By tonight I plan on receiving PSK.  Once Rx works I'll relocate to the shack for some Tx and hopefully my 1st digital QSO.

[WA4STO]

Luck, thanks.  FLdigi rings a strong bell, so it must be popular enough to have stuck in my leaky brain.  I'll go with that.

W1HKJ has been absolutely fabulous in his support of FLDIGI. 

I'm gonna guess that you'll get a great deal of mileage from the user group at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/linuxham/

If you're like me at all, you'll find that the various flavors of PSK, MSK, JT65, Olivia, Thor and Feld hell are great for the "fun" aspects of ham radio.  But for prepping purposes, you'll want to begin exploring WINMOR and (within FLDIGI) the NBEMS suite.  look on w1hkj.com for references to his FLAMP, FLMSG, and FLWRAP thingies.

FLAMP seems to be his newest foray into the notion of allowing for squishing, error-correcting and -- tadah! -- multicasting. 

Dunno if you remember the early 90s ham radio satellites that would broadcast pictures of the earth.  The way they did it was fabulous; they'd transmit the photo to "all" and when it was done, the stations back on terra firma would automatically ask for "fills" until the whole thing was filled up with the appropriate pixels.  Multicasting.

Now the same thing is going on via messages (text, binaries, whatever) within FLAMP.

Me, I haven't gotten into those things yet.  I can sometimes manage one thing at a time at my age.  At present, I'm delighting in the networking aspects of WINMOR which encompasses the all-important ideas of error-correction and compression (which also translates VERY nicely into OPSEC...)

73 de Luck,WA4STO

[White Tiger]

Luck, you continue to astound me with the wealth of information you distribute!

Concerning these modes - do you still recommend FLDIGI to curious types...or would you think something like FLAMP offers more convenience for novices like me?

[madball13]

Luck, you continue to astound me with the wealth of information you distribute!

Concerning these modes - do you still recommend FLDIGI to curious types...or would you think something like FLAMP offers more convenience for novices like me?

As a psk novice myself I have found fldigi to work extremely well, my contact to Kenya was with fldigi. I downloaded HRD and still haven't been able to get that to work correctly.

[WA4STO]

Luck, you continue to astound me with the wealth of information you distribute!

Concerning these modes - do you still recommend FLDIGI to curious types...or would you think something like FLAMP offers more convenience for novices like me?

For the FUN parts of amateur radio, yes, I still admire what W1HKJ has done with FLDIGI:

http://www.w1hkj.com/

If I want to make contact with far-away stations all over the planet, FLDIGI is my software of choice.

And -- guess what -- FLAMP is done by the same clever fella.

FLAMP is interesting in that it allows for a "multicast" sort of Prepper file transfer.  It transmits your data to a number of folks all at once, and then those folks who miss bits and pieces can get whatever "fills" they need.  Nice spectrum efficiency.

Having said that, I've not used FLDIGI in quite some time.  I'm presently focused on providing preparedness data transfer via WINMOR network nodes.  As you might guess, we've been exchanging weather-related preparedness bulletins with/for the guys up in New England the past couple of days.  Gonna be a lot more of that this weekend, methinks...

73 de WA4STO

[gil]

Hello,

I just got a laptop with Windows on it and installed RMS Express. I don't have the Winklink box yet but will get one soon and set-up a radio email address!

Gil.

[White Tiger]

Hello,

I just got a laptop with Windows on it and installed RMS Express. I don't have the Winklink box yet but will get one soon and set-up a radio email address!

Gil.

I have a laptop...can download RMS Express, but what is a WINLINK box?