Bletchley Park

WOW sums up my day at Bletchley Park (BP).  What a place.  I can highly recommend a visit to anyone who has not been.  Well, actually even if you have been!

We arrived just as the doors opened and stayed until they shut and still we felt we could have spent another day or two looking around at the various exhibitions.  Bletchley Park actually consists of several museums.  One is dedicated to WWII codebreaking, Enigma, the Bombe etc another to the National Radio Centre and there is also the National Museum of Computing.

The wartime museum tells the story of Bletchley Park exceedingly well.  Not only where the exhibits excellent but the staff were very knowledgable, keen to talk and to show exhibits working.  How cool was it to see a genuine working three-rotor Enigma 🙂  One of the major creations of BP was the Bombe and to see it working is amazing.  Just its sound and smell are truly memorable.

The National Radio Centre was good and it told the story of radio well. But with the station, GB3RS, I was very disappointed.  In fact I’d say it was the most disappointing element of my day, probably as I had high expectations.  It did not have that welcoming feel and in looking through the door-way I didn’t see much that I felt would draw non radio amateurs in to discover more.  The station was capable of V/UHF and HF operations, however, the V/UHF was unattended and did not appear to be doing much apart from tracking a cube-sat and the HF radio was being used by the RSGB representative initially for Morse then SSB phone.  An area of technology that seemed almost totally unrepresented was data.  This seemed strange as data is the dominant form of communications and is core to the IT and software world that we live in nowadays.  Data modes are great for attracting the inquisitive; its easy to erect some big displays showing waterfall diagrams and real-time contact mapping (e.g. psk reporter, wsprnet), add some computers running ROS, JT65 etc and I’ll bet GB3RS looks more interesting to visitors.

Colossus Bletchley Park

The National Museum of Computing is full of that stuff we all threw out years ago believing it was nothing more than junk. It has the earliest computers, Colossus, through to the latest and everything in between!  I was fascinated, as they seemed to have each pivotal piece of equipment ever made!  It goes without saying that Colossus was amazing, but imagine my surprise to find an early magnetic disk which must have been 4 foot in diameter!  Everything that I’ve grown-up with was there: the Research Machines RM-380z, Sharp MZ80K, Sinclair ZX81, PDP-11, MicroVAX, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64.  Dragon 32, IBM PC, BBC Micro (In fact they had a whole room of working BBC micros!).  The list goes on and on.  I even found a genuine and working Space Invaders arcade machine.  Now that is COOL!

The afternoon weather was foul.  Cold, wet and windy which made moving between the huts that house the exhibitions unpleasant.  It would be so much nicer in the summer when the weather is more conducive to loitering outside looking at the lovely old house or duck pond.

OK, so you get the message.  I had a great time 🙂

So, thanks to my co-conspiriters for a great day: Paul, JohnL, Andy and David.

Till next time,
Andrew
G0RVM