Feld Hell and Friends

Last Friday marked a momentous event in the history of ham radio — the FCC declared that knowledge of Morse Code will no longer be necessary in obtaining any level of ham license. This move has been long forthcoming, especially since many other countries in the past few years have abandoned the Morse requirement. My initial reaction to this news was a bit of guilt, followed by relief: my campaign to learn Morse Code has gotten sidetracked these past few months. The FCC decree goes into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, and from that time on all I’ll have to do is pass a multiple-choice theory and practice of operations exam to get on the air on the high frequency bands (30 Mhz and below).

What I’m immediately interested in is some of the digital keyboarding modes. These take advantage of the digital signal processing capabilities of modern computers’ sound cards. One hooks up the computer to the audio input and output of the transceiver, and types away at the computer to send digital signals over the air. The advantage of these digital modes, and for that matter Morse Code, over voice is that they work very well with weak signals.

There are many of these digital modes in use — some new, for instance PSK31, which has gotten quite popular, dates back to 1999, and some quite old. One of these, Hellschreiber, goes back to 1929 in Germany. It is essentially a fax mode, where one transmits an image of the text one types out, the characters getting encoded into a 49-pixel matrix. It was originally used over landlines and over radio, the latter version termed Feld Hell (Field Hell).

The name Hellschreiber comes from that of the inventor, Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, who turns out to have had a very long and interesting career. He died in 2002 at the age of 100. He eventually got interested in typesetting, and in 1964 invented the first digital typesetting system called the Digiset. His company in 1990 merged with Linotype to form Linotype-Hell AG, a corporate name which seems to have lasted until 1996 when Heidelberg took them over and spun off Linotype as a subsidiary.