Hello from AWA Museum

#1

I am Duncan Brown, K2OEQ, Assistant Curator and Teletypewriter historian at the Antique Wireless Association Museum in Bloomfield (near Rochester), NY, USA. After being semi-active on I-telex for the past year or so, I have finaly gotten registered with the forum.

When I enlisted in the US Army in 1966, I had been a Ham for 8 years, so I thought that they would assign me to a job of radio operator or radio repairman. But instead, they sent me to a school for something I knew nothing about - Teletypewriter Repairman. At my first duty station (in Viet Nam), I found I knew as much radio as the Army-trained Radio Repairmen and slowly was able to move over to radio repair.

After four years in the Army, I worked in civilian jobs as a radio engineer - building and designing HF, VHF, & UHF radios and never did anything more with teletypewriters. When I retired in 2000, I started volunteering at the near-by Antique Wireless Association Museum, to keep active with radios. At the Museum, I found that they had all the components of a transportable Army Radioteletype Station (AN/GRC-46B) that I had worked on in Viet Nam and no one knew anything about them.

I got the AN/GRC-46B radios and teletypewriters (TT-98 & TT-76) operational and that was the beginning of the AWA's teletypewriter collection. We now have about 40 different machines, dating back to about 1900, from a dozen different manufacturers. Telex machines include Siemens T37h & T100 and a RFT T63. The T100 & T63 are not presently fully functional, but the T37 is presently
operational on the I-telex network.

The T37 is only on-line with I-telex when the Museum is open: Tuesdays from 1000-1500 ET (UTC-5) and Saturdays from 1300-1700 ET. I am usually at the Museum on Tuesdays and sometimes on Saturdays. So those are the only times I can send or receive messages.

You can view my virtual tour of the Museum's teletypewriter display at

Hope to talk to you some Tuesday or Saturday,

Duncan Brown, K2OEQ
USASA 31J30

Antique Wireless Assoc. Museum,
Asst. Curator, Commercial Equipment
(also chief TTY op & repairman)

i-Telex: 212503

www.antiquewireless.org
AWA Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX55pe ... ps_VYXdLBA

#2

Hello Duncan,

welcome to the forum. Nice to see you

I hope, we can certainly help online on the two teleprinters (T63 and T100).
Then you can also use these for presentations.

Many greetings from Rieben, Alex and Michael.

#3

Welcome Duncan!

I'm sure youwill receivemuch help and encouragement from all of us here!

Regards
Sean
M1ECY

#4

Hello Duncan,

Welcome from me, too
I will try to send a trans-Atlantic-Telex on Tuesday.

Kind regards
Michael

Gesendet von meinem 2109119DG mit Tapatalk

#5

Hello Duncan

Thanks for the extremely interesting video. I was employed by the dutch PTT between 1962-1968, and used some of the printers you showed. Our "workhorses" at the time, were the Siemens T100 page printer, and then the T68 for traffic between telegrafph offices.
In that period, we had the cold war, as you can remember. The effect of this could also be seen on the Telex / Gentex network. We coiuld not dial into east-european networks, but some cities, like East Berlin, Warszaw and Prague were connected to the dutch network via a dutch number, meaning that there was a line from e.g. East Berlin to the exchange in The Hague, so you could dial East Berlin as if it was locating in The Hague.
This shortcut was used (unofficially) for contacts between west and east germany.
Some years ago, I had some spare time, and then I developped a PC based gentex network, so you could have as many printers on a local network as your PC would allow, more specifically how many COM ports you could accommodate. It also supports i-telex. You are welcome to have a copy if you like.
Have fun in your museum !
Nico, OZ1BMC

#6

Nico,

Thanks for your comments, glad you liked my video.

ALL -

I am traveling and will be off-line for a few months. Will be active again in March.

See you all then

Duncan
K2OEQ

Telexforum.de