From: jws at
jwsss.com
My uncle served in the Navy in the Philippine Islands in a Signal Corps
unit doing communications of some sort. One of the interesting
souvenirs he made and brought back was a 5 level punched tape, which
his oldest daughter had in her collection.
I heard about it and had her copy a bit of it and send the image. After
I figured out the code, I had her send scans of the entire tape 14" at a
time, and have deciphered the entire thing.
I wonder what I could get from the assembled group here to help try to
figure out what terminal might have been used? Unfortunately I don't
have any data showing what he did, other than some bits of stories.
Most of his photos are interesting, but don't give a hint as to what he
was doing.
I have some ideas, but thought I'd ask here before guessing. I'm hoping
to make a guess as to a terminal and then find a photograph for the
scrapbook with the deciphered tape. I also found some naval dispatches
online which I suspect he might have had to do with (form, not specific
dispatches) if he was handling a tty of some sort for transmission.
Anyway if you have info you want to share, feel free to send off the
list, or on if it won't go to far afield.
BTW, for those who want to read a lot of interesting info, here is the
site with the dispatches, and a lot of other fun reading about WW2 affairs.
http://www.uboatarchive.net/index.html
I know the main topic is about german subs, but there are some nice
dispatches which I suspect are similar in form to what they would have
used with mechanical transmission equipment. I'd also take any
descriptions about procedures, and other equipment if it is on this topic.
I have a group of WW2 aviators I'm going to send this to for response as
well, but this group will probably know about the coding and technical info.
thanks
Jim
A baudit teletype? Similar to a normal teletype except it has a
square box with the type heads.
I'm not sure what your asking about. Blind people still use the 5 bit
code for data.
They did have encrypting machines I suspect the ones they were
using had tubes in them. If the tape you have is encrypted you
are unlikely to decode such a small message.
If it was in plain text that is easier.
Most encrypting of the time used several LFSRs with sets of polynomials.
data was feed into each similar to crc used for error correction.
They'd have punch cards to select coefficients.
Even knowing how these machines worked, it would be difficult
if not impossible to decode such a message.
Dwight