Where Is All The RTTY? What Is RTTY? HF Digital Mode

If you haven't operated RTTY HF digital mode before, you may learn a few things here in this brief video. Exploring another option for HF digital modes, but RTTY was around way before amateur radio digital mode.

SUBSCRIBE

[Rthomassc]

Enjoyed your video.

I was a radio repair specialist back in 70's. Rtty was my daily work ryryryryryryryryry was a lullaby. The story of the quick brown fox needed to be told every day.
When I left military service I walked into school working the same equipment or older in computer science. Now it is almost like AM radio. No actually it is worse. FSK and psk can still lull me to sleep and people ask why do you listen to that static. In part it is the voice of long parted friends and colleges and dreams left behind.

[itmeng]

If you are ever in Cape Cod Mass, check out the Marconi museum in Chatham. They have a working original RTTY terminal from the old RCA sending/receiving station. Great place to visit if you are ever in the area and are into the hobby.

[TheArtofEngineering]

Yes I remember my Elmer had converted mechanical office teletype terminals to do RTTY in his shack. Then at sea as a ship’s RO, I used ARQ which had error correction. Cool stuff!

[BruceInFlorida]

Back in my starting years on the police force, in the later 1970's, I was placed in the Comms Dept, mainly because of my Ham Radio involvement. I spent time each day on RTTY machines, much like you showed in those still photos. We would use RTTY to transmit statewide to other agencies with requests for info, transmit BOLO's both in and out of state, and used RTTY as out primary source of receiving info from sources throughout the US. It was a fun and interesting time, especially once someone taught you the "secret" things that you could do with RTTY, once you learned to jump circuits, bypass relays and the like :) Those were some fun times back in the comm shack !

[jfranke]

You’re videos are really peaking my interest in digital. Thanks!

[daveborchard]

I used an old teletype keyboard like that when I was in high school. It connected to a mainframe computer at 110 baud with an acoustic telephone coupler. They only had one teletype keyboard in the whole school that had to be shared. The paper tape you showed is called paper tape. I used to have some paper tape and old computer punch cards, but they were all thrown away years ago. I used keypunch machines in college just after high school. Stacks of the computer cards were read by the card reader machines. Each line of code was a separate card. That was called batch computing. Batch computing is still alive today. It’s not done with cards, but batch computing is called computer jobs or batch jobs.

My first exposure to RTTY was as a ham in the mid to late 70s. I owned an older teletype for awhile, and got it working, but junked it because it was too much of a boat anchor. Today’s modern digital modes are vastly superior to the old days. My favorite mode was AMTOR ARQ. AMTOR was error free, perfect copy. AMTOR worked down deep into the noise. When 20 meters was closing for the nights, the AMTOR stations were the last signals on the band, riding the QSB as the band died for the night.

After being inactive on HF for over 30 years, I’m getting back on HF in my retirement years. In my 20s, I envy’s the old timers who were retired and could be on HF during the daytime and nights. Decades ago, I dreamed that’s what I’d do when I got old enough to retire. I regret being inactive on HF for so many decades, but now I’m going to get back on HF again. Not with my old Kenwood TS-940 that’s plagued with problems and not functioning, but with a new Icom 7610. It will be great to get on the new digital modes, and maybe the old digital modes like AMTOR, if I can find someone to talk to with AMTOR. I started ham radio in 1972 as a 25 to 30 wpm fast novice. My CW is rusty now, but I’m plan to get back my CW skills too. CW was my favorite mode, until the first AMTOR QsO with an AEA CP-1 and a Commodore 64 Computer. Now, I’ll be using much more refined equipment and digital modes.

Thanks for your videos! Your videos helped encourage me to get back on HF during my retirement years!

[artnickel]

Worked RTTY for Navy MARS in the 70s at NAS Lemoore, CA. In fact, that is what my introduction to Ham Radio was. We'd receive messages via RTTY on MARS band, convert to typed messages from paper tape then use SSB to contact other stations with traffic. Did the reverse going east to west. Used a Kenwood TS-520 and Kentronics RTTY decoder. We used a TELETYPE MODEL 28 ASR COPYING ITTY to make and read tapes/print message traffic; it was also hooked to the TS-520.
Our traffic came from 4 states and from Guam & Hawaii, all just outside 80-meters.

[Jimwill]

My only experience with RTTY was in the US Navy, whenever I got back in the radio shack! 😁 But I ( like many others ) remember the clacking teletypes in movie news rooms!

[CRMLarry]

Had an old 60 baud teletype machine back in the late 70s. Noisy but fun. Ended up using it as a printer for my TRS-80 Mod 1
N5LL

[nateworzel]

I am enjoying these digital mode demonstrations; keep it up! Those old machines are cool. They remind me of player pianos, having those little tapes. I'm still a tech. and I don't have any 6m gear so I haven't done any none voice digital stuff. I definitely want to get on eventually.

[diverbob]

OK, Hear goes an oldtimers stroy about RTTY. I knew a guy from the local radio club (back in the mid 60's) who had been exposed to RTTY during WWII. The standard practice, as you stated was to make the punch tape on a keyboard maching and then run it through the tape reader which was attached to an audio modulator which made the Mark and Space Tones (I forget, someting like 500 & 200 Hz) that then could be sent into an AM Transmitter mic jack. So this as AFSK. The tape readers were nominally, 110 Baud.

So enter my high school girlfriend who went to airline school after graduation. In the airlines in those days, there was still heavy use of teletype. As it happened, she had been a superior typist in high school and she evolved into the fastest teletypist that the school had ever seen. She could actually go faster than the 110 Baud system.

She comes home from school and I take her to see my buddies RTTY setup. He sends a typical CQ messge and gets a response. So she starts typing out the reply while the incoming message is coming in and when it was finished, we fed in the beginning of the tape and the reply / answer began going back in real time. After a bit, this drew a crowd and we had a real pileup before long of guys trying to figure out how this was being done!

She would have has a great time now being able to type straight out to the transmitter!

[JimWeslager]

Recently have gotten involved with RTTY contesting, which is a ball. Currently using 2 HF radios and 2 PC's to run SO2R, which is somewhat challenging as the rigs are different. Thanks goodness for the free N1MM+ and MMTTY apps to log, QSY and TX/RX RTTY. Although RTTY may not be as popular as it was, there are still plenty of RTTY contesters using the mode. If you may be interested in RTTY contesting, check out a great source of info at www.rttycontesting.com. See ya around the bands, boys.

[TimTools]

Just what I was looking for. I've run PSK but never RTTY. Thanks for the video.

[daveborchard]

That’s called paper tape. I used an old time TTY terminal like that in the late 60’s to maybe early 70’s in school. It communicated with a mainframe computer using an acoustic coupler for the telephone, I think at 110 baud.

[bb_]

It's a popular contest mode because the exchange goes pretty quickly. An experienced RTTY operator can make several contacts per minute during a contest.

[DeeegerD]

Ex military communications expert and a HAM for 30 years and never heard it called R T T Y or Teletype yes.  Ritty never.

[pathopkins]

The advantage of the new digital modes is that you only need a small amount of power RF to send and receive than RTTY to get a slow message out =( The older RTTY had a TUNE to the phasing of TWO TONE operation and the error is directly related to that phasing =) RTTY needs much MORE POWER RF than the other digital modes .... even CW can be used in LOW POWER levels =) RTTY take up the same band width as 10 PSK-31 mode signals =)

[jerrydiver]

RTTY was a big deal for Navy weather offices at sea for a long time. We still had it on my aircraft carrier in the 1980s; that, along with the radio-fax charts was the source of much of the weather information from the outside world. I believe it must have been much the same on most ships at sea for several decades.

[tomhuber]

Like some others I am ex military and did rtty on ground and airborne. Have been ham for 40 years and want to get back to some casual rtty not contests. Thanks for video hope to c u on the band's. 73 Tom WDØBFO

[geoffreyvoeth]

I once intercepted a non-encrypted signal which listed all names of passengers aboard the Lockerbe Scotland Air Disaster and at that time was told it was most likely an embassy communications. So, I will guess that most RITTY stuff is nw updated and you will never again see such kinds of communications. It was kind of interesting because earlier I was asked by my boss to check out a radio which a young woman believed had a bomb inside. Knowing explosives like I do right away I thought no no bomb since RDX is very dense and would make a radio unusually heavy. But I took it all apart and plugged it in to the wall and I could sense no bomb being present.