[GreenKeys] news wire photos

[n9vmo at comcast.net]

Lee,

Sorry for the duplicate, tried to resend this to the group. 

You definitely are not the only one who has hands on experience with "burning a fax".  I on the other hand might be the youngest (48) and the one with the most recent experience. 

My sordid tale starts with my recollections of visiting my dad at the local newspaper and seeing the M15ROs in the glass enclosed room churning out news copy and a very large machine with a spinning drum smoking and sparking and magically making a picture on a piece of paper. All of this was when I was about 3 years old in about 1964 or so. 

Jump to 1989 when I was a Sgt. in the USAF assigned to a mobile comm unit in Germany. One of the pieces of equipment was a fax machine for printing out weather maps received off of the SW bands. We had 4 of these receive units in the equipment van plus the scanner/transmitter that could send out locally generated WX maps.   The receivers were Collins 651S1 receivers that not only covered SW but medium and longwave also.  I made an unauthorized and very easy mod to the wiring that restored the LW capability and started playing.

One day I found a fax signal in the LW portion of the band so I connected one of the fax machines and hit start thinking I was going to get a WX chart. You can imagine my surprise when a news photo came off the machine. 
When the second picture started printing I was even more surprised to find that the signal I was receiving was from East Germany!  I left the machine run all day and probably had a good dozen "newswire" photos. 

Joe Montano
N9VMO
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