Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–46 of 46 posts

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#41

Post by IrishJourno »

golem14 wrote: post #40
IrishJourno wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original article author here: There's isn't anything on the wider web about this project because it is a bespoke creation for IEEE Spectrum's Hands On column! If you're not familiar with the column, it's always written at a pretty high level. That said, I will be putting all the code up on a public repo, once I get a chance (hopefully very soon!) to verify a cold install on a fresh machine does work.

Thanks! To be clear, it’s totally fine to write articles like this, obviously. I just felt that some who goes above and beyond on such an esoteric subject would be vibrating with energy to share as many details with likeminded enthusiasts:) If I had more time, I’d like to play with this (and trying to recreate an old style stand alone tnc for packet radio) :)

I'm normally pretty good about writing close to length, but the first draft of this 950-word article was over 2,000 words long. :) I only get three pages per issue though, so even though sometimes it's painful deciding what lore to leave out, it has to be done :)

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#42

Post by hakfoo »

6510 wrote: post #34
mrkwse wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viewing the fee as being for a volume of storage doesn't seem the right perspective. It's $1500 to lease some %age of spectrum for some period. If true Teletext on an analogue signal and broadcast vs cable, then $1500 for 0.05% of the total non-media spectrum doesn't feel like a terrible deal. $1500 today is probably in the region of 10s of GB, sure, but that's almost a commodity volume by comparison in terms of supp…

The way I thought of it at the time was that they had 2 kinds of content, official stuff like news, to make the service actually useful, for which they didn't get a cent and commercial stuff which started at that unfunny amount. They had nothing in between. For example, I could have made a page with sub-pages with the menu from various restaurants in town. It didn't occur to me that one could monopolize delivery and…

In the US there were some experiments on delivering high-volume content by broadcasting, say, a 30-second spot which flashed dozens or hundreds of images and you were supposed to record it on videotape and play it back frame-by-frame.

There was one local channel here which pointed a camera at a fishtank while idle; if you wanted a specific data package, you called a number to request it. I think the high-water mark for the concept was a few national ads where they said "we'll broadcast the entire Chevrolet catalogue at the top of the hour, have your VCR ready." The problem being, you had to run a second advertisement to get the audience ready for the first one!

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#43

Post by quink »

techcode wrote: post #28

I recently learned that captions on BBC are teletext based (page 888) so I turned them on and got surprised that it's still working that way - especially considering I'm watching it basically via IPTV (using Dutch KPNs Android SmartTV app).

The 888 in the top right corner back in the day: https://youtu.be/rAk94cq23HQ?si=JLJMSqbUjKUsFcdQ just amazing that teletext was understood and ubiquitous to such an extent that just putting three numbers was important and clear enough to share in these very sparse idents.

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#44

Post by golem14 »

IrishJourno wrote: post #41
golem14 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! To be clear, it’s totally fine to write articles like this, obviously. I just felt that some who goes above and beyond on such an esoteric subject would be vibrating with energy to share as many details with likeminded enthusiasts:) If I had more time, I’d like to play with this (and trying to recreate an old style stand alone tnc for packet radio) :)

I'm normally pretty good about writing close to length, but the first draft of this 950-word article was over 2,000 words long. :) I only get three pages per issue though, so even though sometimes it's painful deciding what lore to leave out, it has to be done :)

This is just me, but I would have written the 2000 word article, and made it it a md file on github as future home of the code you're going to drop. Then link it from the 950 word IEEE article. Then you'd already have a crystallization point for future work.

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#45

Post by techcode »

ADHD brain just recalled that similar concept was used for traffic jams being sent along FM radio signal.

Not talking about stuff that would automatically change the FM station to the one with traffic announcements.

Our ~2012 Škoda Octavia had typical Volkswagen Audi Group navigation built in. It would receive data about traffic jams in the background, and incorporate it into route/navigation decisions.

Not sure if switch from FM to DAB carried that over too. Kind of doubtful since mobile phones took over navigation even before Android/iOS Auto stuff showed up.

Re: Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio

#46

Post by 6510 »

IrishJourno wrote: post #38
6510 wrote: post #10

I think you had 999 pages but each page could have 9999 sub pages. The pages were send one by one so if you typed 200 you would have to wait for page 200 to cycle by. If it had 100 sub pages you would have to wait 100 times as long. I believe more important pages could be send more often or similarly the cycle would skip less important pages. Decent TV's would just store pages and sub pages until the next cycle. I as…

Original article author here: Yes, key pages were multiple times over teletext. It's a bit of a grey area for amateur radio regs, so I didn't mention it in the article, but you could use the software with say, an license-free part 15 short wave FM transmitter, to send an entire carousel of many pages. As such the code does have an option to flag ket pages and specify how many times they should be repeated over a caro…

I remembered my grand vision for teletext. All pages should be dedicated to a text based rpg using the Choose Your Own Adventure mechanic[0]

People want to fight orcs and goblins, ride dragons, cast magic missile and save the princess.

That (using teletext) one can update the plot dynamically makes for a fun creative challenge. Should probably draw a giant flow chart with the 999 states. When all pages are used you have to remove things before you can add things.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

Post reply on HN