[Waverley ARS] Notice of special Cipher Event involving Bletchley Park

[Eddie Hanham]

Dear Members,

Whilst the WARS Overseas travellers were in UK Jim, Brad, Grant and 
Eddie visited the Bletchley Park Museum and the resident ARS the " 
Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society" (MKARS)on the night of their 
weekly meeting. 

Bletchley Park is the home of the WWII codecrackers and the birth of 
the Turing computer called Collossus. Bletchley Park contributed 
considerably to the winning of WWII by the allies by decryptimg 
German cyphers sent by the Enigma and Lorenz encypting machines.

We were lucky to be introduced to the MKARS President, and some of 
their members and given a personal presentation of the Spy Radio 
Museum. A short video taken on the night will be presented at the 
Next WARS Meeting.

This email is being sent to advise members of a Special Cipher Event 
sheduled for 15 ~ 16th November, to celebrate the completion of the 
Colossus Mk 2 Rebuild.

What is the EVENT about ?

To transmit, by radio, by teleprinter, from the Heinz Nixdorf 
Computer Museum in Paderborn in Germany, a series of secret messages 
enciphered on a WW II Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine.

To issue a world-wide challenge to anyone to break the cipher 
settings and decipher these messages before the Rebuild of WW II 
Colossus Mk 2 in Bletchley Park does it. 

Go to following web addresses to understand more.

For an Overview see:

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/

For the Colossus Rebuild Project in the  National Museum of Computing 

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/cevent.htm

For those that can read BASIC download Lorenz decoding software, 
QBASIC etc from:

http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/cipherset.zip

This is short notice of this event and for those that would like to 
get involved to a greater detail, let me know by email. Some members 
are very keen to have a go at decoding the transmissions and we can 
contact Bletchley ARS via echolink for assistance VK2TUI has already 
made contact. Please don't wait till the next meeting to get started.

Eddie Hanham
President
VK2BEH

PS - Here is an email fron MKARS Chairman:

 
"....The Colossus cipher event will take place 15 ~ 16th November 
MKARS involvement will be to receive the ciphered code and do all the 
comms between it being transmitted in Germany and Bletchley Park. The 
Idea is for anyone to crack the code before Colossus can! I have 
attached and article from our local rag that explains more and if 
your members visit http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/cevent.htm (also 
take a look at the other pages this site is very interesting) it 
should give them all the information required. Should you require 
more just let me know.
 
73 de John (M0TIF)
Chairman
Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society
 

VISIT OUR WEB SITE WWW.MKARS.ORG.UK


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