One for SWL and CW fanatics, or just the keen and the curious! Even the 2 ‘radio equivalent of J ‘City Pop’ idol obsessed’ RTTY fans reading this are welcome!
Keep your lugholes within the vicinity of a radio at 2000 BST on Saturday August 30th. It doesn’t matter if its a fancy schmancy Hildelberg (i forget how to spell it, they cost jillions anyway) or a battered Matsui your nan got for the kitchen from the 1985 Argos catalogue.
Maybe take a radio to a bunker, sit in the bath with an Airfix submarine or drive to Milton Keynes for full immersion. The choice is yours!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to check out the link below for full instructions on frequencies, a one time pad and, if you don’t have access to an actual Enigma machine, some Enigma emulation software to decode the broadcast messages.
In case folks missed it or anyone is keen to hear the transmission, it’s available below. If you fancy cheating you can find the decoded message in the description.
This is certainly true and it’s the way I learned all those years ago. The only disadvantage is that all “words” are exactly five characters, unlike normal text. I don’t particularly remember that giving me a problem when I started using Morse Code on the air but I was only 15 and everything’s easy to learn at that age!
I tried listening to that recording, and I’ll give it another go some time, but it’s pushing my speed limits for random groups and it suffers from the same problem I have with almost all online CW recordings in being pitched at just about my worst possible frequency. I usually tune somewhat lower, so when I give it another go I’ll see what it sounds like when I pipe it through some serious pitch shift…
The image below is taken from the video at the top of this post.
The key shown in the image below would appear to be a Lionel J-38. My limited understanding is that these were manufactured in large numbers by the Lionel Company of New York starting around 1940. They were standard issue for the US military in WWII. Others from ‘across the pond’ will likely know more.
A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be given one of these keys by a good friend. All cleaned up, and with pride of place on my shack desk, it still works excellently-well some 85 years after leaving the factory. It says Lionel on the base-plate.
One distinguishing feature of this model of key relates to the ‘vertical black knob’ circled in red below. This is attached to a narrow metal strip that rotates in the horizontal plane, and is at ground potential.
By pulling the knob towards the centre-line of the key, the metal strip slides under the spring-clip you can see in the image. When this is done, the key is permanently ‘ON’. This allows the operator to have both hands free to swiftly ‘plate and load’ the PA of his valve/tube transmitter.
As you can see in the image, the metal strip is under the spring-clip. As such, although the operator is ‘banging away’ on the key, it would seem he is actually sending nothing at all as the key is in the permanently ‘ON’ state …
Dave, my understanding is also limited, but notice the strap at the back edge of the key with contacts at each end. That brings us up to two contacts on the left for incoming wires and two on the right for outgoing wires, used in landline circuits such as rail stations. Also in the circuits, starting in the 1850’s, are “sounders” that make a slightly different click when a key is pressed, than when it is released. At the end of a transmission, the operator closes the switch you circled in red, leaving only the sounder at his/her end of the circuit, ready to receive a message from the other station. Power is by battery at a single location. My sounder has a pair of ten ohm coils, but other resistances are available.
Elliott, K6EL
