[GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal

[Jack]

ZCZC

Well, this isn't exactly a graceful way to do it, but it worked
for me...

I provided a 28 TTY for a movie ("American Gangster" with Denzel Washington)
a few years ago and they wanted to be able to send messages to it on the
fly. Usually I'd bring along a TD and tape.
So I brought my laptop and a Dovetron ASCII-to-Baudot box (TBA-1000). I set
the
laptop to 110 Baud ASCII and dumped it into the Dovetron. The Dovetron then
outputted at 100 wpm Baudot.  Another way to do it is with a Black Box CAP
which is a code converter. It does just about anything in and anything
out...
they still sell them.  (By the way, the TTY scene was cut from the movie...
but I had a great time and a  few movie stars got to meet me.)

Finally, you could load in Heavymetal and it would work OK, but not as
simply as the above stuff.  The good thing, though, is that you can have
preload test messages in Heavymetal (.txt files), ready to send.

Nothing beats a Fox Box....!

Finally...has anyone ever tried to figure out how to use one of the
"TTY for the deaf" terminals? They were originally Baudot. 

Jack K0TTY

NNNN





-----Original Message-----
From: greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Jim Haynes
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 4:30 PM
To: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal

Sometimes I've wished for a portable Baudot terminal to use in testing TTY
gear.

I have an old Dell C610 laptop and those are dirt cheap on ebay, and have a
COM port.  There are some old DOS programs that make a PC into a "glass TTY"
and are still available.  One I have used is called rtty12g - you can google
for it.

Now the trouble is that the laptop has Windows XP, and while rtty12g will
run under Windows XP it doesn't do the right thing.  Specifically it doesn't
set the UART to 5 bit characters; it sets the baud rate correctly but sends
8 bit characters.  I guess in DOS the program can poke the UART registers
directly to get the desired properties.

So one solution would be if someone knows how to set the UART to 5 bits in
Windows XP and later.

A rather grubby way I have working now is that I have a floppy drive on the
laptop.  I formatted a floppy on a Win98 machine, then copied the rtty12g
files to it, and boot from the floppy.  This works, but I wouldn't suggest
to anybody to go through that process.

Another possibility is to create a partition on the hard drive in the laptop
and install FreeDOS and rtty12g.  Right now I don't know enough about how to
install just enough of FreeDOS and make it bootable along with the other
stuff on the laptop (WinXP and Linux).  I'm assuming FreeDOS would let the
program do what it wants to do to the hardware registers.

Jim W6JVE

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
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