[GreenKeys] rtty 101

[John Lawson]

   Gil Smith writes:

>The antenna is my immediate concern, as I am now in a position to provide
>for it on an old house we are remodeling for our business.  So this
>brings up a few questions:


  Hi Gil...  here in NorCal, I do a lot of RTTY work using my Ham gear, a
Kenwood TS-430S and a 40' dipole in the attic. The antenna's too short and
too close to the ground (15') but I'm renting and that's what I can do
right now.  I'm limited to 20 meters and above for transmitting.  For
recieiving, especially for SWL-type activities, I also use an Icom
PCR-1000 'brick' radio (200Khtz to 1.3 Ghtz) and a discone type antenna.
For RTTY, I generally use TrueTTY (www.dxsoft.com), or I crank up my Model
19 and use a Dovetron as the Terminal Unit.  I have found that the right
discone works well for broad-band reception, though they naturally tend to
favor VHF...  with a sensitive reciever they offer a good trade-off
between performance and 'real estate'.

  As Jack has intimated, there is precious little unencrypted RTTY around
anymore...  when I lived in India, I could often get the Australian Navy
conducting exercise traffic, and there are sometimes press and marine
traffic to be heard...  of course there are still some Ham signals from
folks like me who stubbornly cling to anachronistic and pre-historic modes
of long-gone communications, clogging up precious bandwidth with our
annoying deedle-deedle spam....    but I digress.   ;}

  Signals *are* out there, it just takes research and patience.
Soundcard-based decoding programs for PCs or Macs are very helpful when it
comes to snooping out such traffic, since a lot of them offer
sophisticated signal analysis and display components.


  Write me privately if I can be of more help...

  Cheers

John  KB6SCO