[GreenKeys] More 28ASR K-KT-T madness

[Steve Garrison]

I worked with KW-7 & KW-26 as a TTY guy in the AF in the mid to late 60s and we never used the TD stepper circuitry either.  And the one comm center that I was in for nearly 18 months that used a KL-7 was without any adapters to punch or read a 5 level tape.  The message was encrypted from a plain text message on the KL-7, then the 5 letter groups produced by the KL-7 were manually typed on a TTY keyboard to a reperf to make the 5 level tape, then fed thru a TD and to the KWs and out to the circuit.  And any incoming traffic that came in as 5 letter groups were then manually typed into the KL-7 to decrypt.  A very slow and laborious undertaking!

Anyone interested in playing with the KL-7 simulator that's available.  I've used it quite a bit and I can attest to it sounds as being very accurate.  And TTY repairman had to keep the KL-7 repaired in the AF since it was mostly mechanical.  The "crypto" guys didn't work on anything much more mechanical than the door on the KW-26 that cut the 80 column card when it was closed so  it couldn't be used again!

You know I never did understand that mechanism!  If the card was cut as the door closed, how did it know it wasn't cut before the door was closed?  Any AFSC 306s out there in Greenkeys land?

Steve G./N4TTY

-----Original Message-----
From: greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net <greenkeys-bounces at mailman.qth.net> On Behalf Of Duncan Brown
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 11:11 AM
To: Nick England <navy.radio at gmail.com>; Greenkeys <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] More 28ASR K-KT-T madness

Nick, Ralph,

As a TTY repairman in the Army, I worked with KW-7 & KW-26 and they did not need to step the tape readers. We never used the stepping feature, anyway. (I know the KW-7 does have a stepping control output, but maybe only to be backwards compatible?)

I think the stepping control was required for the older, mechanical crypto equipment, like the KL-7/-47. They were off-line machines, but there were adapters to allow a TTY tape message to be fed into the crypto unit. One was the TSEC/HL-1, which was only rated at 50 wpm (CSP-6620A).  The TT-36/GGA-1 (which we have discussed before) was maybe an earlier version of the HL-1.

-...-


As  for TEMPEST, here is the original (declassified) NSA history of it: 
https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-spectrum/tempest.pdf

More TEMPEST info at
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/19/tempest-a-tin-foil-hat-for-your-electronics-and-their-secrets/

Have fun,

Duncan



On 2/19/2020 08:20, Nick England wrote:
> There were TSEC/KW-7 crypto units aboard and I know that had a step 
> pulse output to synchronize the TTY characters.
>
>

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