A bit of my past

[Bill]

Blimey, this is a bit of a memory jogger for me.

From YouTube

The video shows four of the products I developed and produced some thirty years ago now, all being used together. The main item was a small decoder unit with a built-in display that allowed various signals to be translated to plain text. Because of its small size, we named it the Microreader. A great deal of effort was put into making all the electronics extremely quiet, allowing it to be used in close proximity to a sensitive radio receiver without causing interference.

This was very successful but having incorporated all the radio ham functions into the unit, I started looking at some of the strange commercial and coded transmissions I could hear that made no sense. The particular one in this video is radio teletype (RTTY) and consists of what looks like groups of five random characters. I managed to find an obscure book where all the codes were explained, so I decided I’d make what was essentially a very fast electronic version of that book. I called it a Synoptic decoder as one of it’s principle uses was in weather, but it was also very good at aircraft reporting giving flight numbers, altitude, airspeed etc, an early version of flight radar if you will.

The output from the Synoptic decoder had far too much info to be displayed on the Microreader’s small display so it was converted to RS232 for external displays. The problem back then was that display monitors were extremely noisy and would interfere with the signals being received. To overcome this problem, we developed a large display unit using the same low noise methods used in the original decoder.

Although developed for radio ham enthusiasts, following a glowing review on the BBCs Word service we found ourselves supplying to various commercial, governmental, and military establishments around the world. I distinctly remember speaking with the head honcho of the European NAVTEXT service who told me that our little box was outperforming their expensive commercial equipment and not just by a small amount. The ham radio market had peaked and it was time to move on so the company was sold (gifted) to a member of staff who continued to supply and support things for several years while we moved on to develop equipment specifically for the taxi trade.

That’s another story though.

 

Bill 😊

[Confused52]

1 hour ago, Bill said:

Found this on YouTube

Excellent, and this Microreader Mk2 Morse+TTY ERA, Enterprise Radio Applications Ltd,; |Radiomuseum.org

I considered buying one of those back in the day.

[Bill]

That’s interesting!

A heck of a lot of CB folk at that time bought these purely as a means of learning morse code which was a requirement back then in order to get a full ham radio licence, so maybe you were one of these?

The info in your link says MK2 Microreader but the image shows the older original MK1 (without the bar-graph and knob) which was basically just morse and RTTY. I may have posted this before but here’s a clip of the later MK2 in use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb6TTetgPj0

So, were you a licenced ham and if so were you a member of the Warrington ARC?

 

Bill G8HLZ 😊

[Confused52]

G8NHD and no not a member. It was for RTTY more than Morse, I had a Telegraphist Father in Law, so I mostly avoided the subject of Morse.

[Bill]

All good stuff Con.

Morse code was always the trickiest thing to get right given that like handwriting it varied from one person to the next. We did actually start developing an advanced commercial decoder that employed quite complex statistical methods to improve accuracy. Things were looking good, but the project ultimately got dropped when one of the key people involved was killed in a light aircraft crash.

It’d be interesting to see what could be achieved along these lines with a modern microprocessor although these days everything’s done using computers. Takes all the fun out of things.  

 

Bill 😊