[1"z The Beadle a Radioteletype (RTTY) monitoring program by Rex Johnson A Beadle, according to my dictionary, is 'A parish official appointed by vestry to punish petty offenders'. My Beadle whips the 'beadle- eadle- eadle tones of RTTY transmissions into readable form. Hardware requirements are a short wave receiver and an audio tone demodulator with a +5v/0v output that connects to the Amiga serial input line [N.B. Due to problems in driving the serial port at suitable speeds, this version connects to the outside world via Joystick Port #2, Pin 6 ('Fire1' input,), with Pin 8 as ground :  o o o o o  o o o o Front view of port #2 on the Amiga.  6 8 ] NewsDisk readers can run The Beadle by double clicking on that icon. Note that without any signals coming in, you will only be able to admire the screen and click on some menu items. Firstly, a little bit of info about RTTY. The name Radioteletype derives from the American teletype machines originally used for sending typewriter style messages over telephone wires, what we would nowadays call Telex. The Telex network covers the world and is a switched network in the same manner as the telephone network, that is, dial the number of the person you want to communicate with and type your message. Signals sent between Telex machines are DC voltages rather than the audio tones associated with computer bulletin boards, these being produced and received by a modem or 'Modulator/ Demodulator'. Another difference is that where computers normally send an 8 bit code called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the Telex network uses a 5 bit code named after early pioneers in this field, the Murray or Baudot code. These bits are the information carrying part of each character signal which is sent in serial form down the line in the form of 'high' and 'low' voltages which are referred to as Mark and Space levels. They have tacked on the front of the signal a Start Pulse which is 1 bit long and on the end, a stop pulse which may be 1, 1+1/2 or 2 bits long to aid the machines to synchronize their sending and receiving mechanisms. Because in the early days the Telex machines were real 'clunkers' they could not operate at the sort of speeds commonly used today by electronic terminals and so standard speeds of 45, 50 or 75 baud were used. Speeds associated with electronic terminals normally start at 300 baud and go on up through 600, 1200, 2400 baud and higher. To avoid too many errors when operating at these high speeds, a parity bit can be inserted. This bit can be set by the user so that the number of mark bits in a character code is always even or odd, the bit may always be a mark or space or may not be used at all. The receiving machine would be set to the same configuration selected (say Even parity) and would always expect an even number of character code bits to arrive. Anything without an even parity would be flagged as an error and not printed. Moving on to the radio usage of Telex, DC signalling voltages had to be converted to something that could be detected at the other end of a radio link and restored to DC levels to allow the machines to work. The practice adopted was to set up a radio transmitter on its assigned frequency, and when the teleprinter sent a character code of Mark and Space signals, shift the transmitter frequency sideways and back again in sympathy with them. This form of modulation is called Frequency Shift Keying and is very common today. Depending on the way that the transmitter is set up, a Mark level from the teleprinter may cause the frequency transmitted to be at either the higher or lower frequency with the Space level being lower or higher. Users expanded and modified codes to suit their best interests and so a variety of code types developed. Some of these are covered in more detail in the following description of The Beadle. A look at the menu options provided shows that some of the 'Code Types' and 'Utilities' are ghosted. Sorry, but that just shows my dreams are bigger than my programming hours. Manyana, maybe. Project Menu Clear Screen Fills the screen up. (Blanks of course) Clipboard I have in mind being able to transfer received data to a word processor for editing and saving. (Not implemented) About One page of info. Pretty general stuff. Quit For those who want to. Settings Menu Baud Rate Selectable 45,50,66,75,100,110,300 baud Polarity Select Space or Mark as the high transmitted frequency. Letter Shift Select shift to the Letters register on receipt of either a Space character or a Letter Shift character. Sometimes called USOS or 'UnShift On Space'. Very handy for getting good text copy on noisy signals. Carriage Return Select a printed '<' or get an actual carriage return on screen Bits Select any of 5,7,8 or 10 bit code. 5 for Baudot, 7 or 8 for ASCII, 10 for TOR traffic Parity Select parity Off or On. No error checking done, I am just going to allow for the bit being there. Code Type ASCII For copying 7 or 8 bit code, say at 300 baud. Baudot 5 bit code, no parity, up to 110 baud. Two registers, one for letter characters and one for figure characters. Cyrillic 5 bit code, no parity, up to 110 baud. Russian language transmissions using baudot type machines with either two or three registers possible. (Not implemented) ARQTOR Automatic Retransmission reQuest, Teleprinting Over Radio. A radio extension of the Telex network. (Not implemented) FECTOR Forward Error Correcting, TOR. More commercial traffic messaging systems. (Not implemented) PACKET Amateur Radio Packet Network. A special protocol for message passing. Try ASCII 300 baud. You will get the header info appearing on every line. (Not implemented) Facsimile Facsimile picture transmissions. (Not implemented) Utilities Logbook A database of operator log entries. (Not implemented) Notepad The interim approach to editing the clipboard, because Notepad has a clipboard facility too. (Very interim. Not implemented) Analyse A pretty rudimentry signal analysis facility. If you have a clean signal copy you should be able to get a good idea what baud rate you are monitoring. As you can see there is still a bit of work to do, but at least the framework is there for me to build on. While I was working on the 'Analyse' module, I started getting ideas for a Preferences style buttons and guages approach to making selections and displaying signal analysis data. Who knows, I may even do it. If The Beadle sparks any interest around the place then get in touch, it is lonely being the only Amiga user in the world playing with RTTY.