June 2, 2026
Old buttons, new chaos
Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio
Nostalgia nerds are obsessed as fans dream of uncensorable retro info pages
TLDR: A ham radio fan is reviving teletext, the pre-internet TV text service, as a new retro way to send simple information. Commenters turned it into a bigger story: some praised hobby-for-hobby’s-sake, others got nostalgic, and a few dreamed of uncensorable DIY information networks.
A vintage TV feature most people forgot even existed just got dragged back into the spotlight, and the comments are absolutely living for it. The project itself is charmingly nerdy: one ham radio enthusiast looked at old-school teletext — those simple text pages people once used for weather, news, and TV listings before the web took over — and thought, what if this came back through radio? It’s part retro tribute, part weekend experiment, and that was enough to send readers straight into a nostalgia spiral.
But the real show was the crowd reaction. One camp was deeply wholesome, basically saying: stop asking whether it’s useful and let hobbies be hobbies. That vibe hit hard, with people defending the joy of building weird things just because they’re fun. Another group went full memory lane, swapping stories about how old TV signals once carried tiny bursts of data across entire countries — proof, they said, that this “outdated” idea was secretly pretty clever all along.
Then came the spicy turn: one commenter imagined a citywide network of rotating teletext pages with “no ability to censor it,” which instantly gave the thread a rebellious, cyberpunk edge. Others piled on with collector energy, linking teletext recreations and geeking out over page numbers, delays, and the oddly lovable agony of waiting for your page to appear. In other words: a retro radio experiment became a comment-section festival of nostalgia, freedom talk, and delightfully petty teletext trivia.
Key Points
- •The article revisits teletext as a low-bandwidth digital information system once widely used on analog television in Europe, including Ireland’s Aertel service.
- •Teletext was first developed in the United Kingdom and publicly launched by the BBC as Ceefax, using unused blank lines in analog TV signals to carry rotating pages of data.
- •Its readability relied on the SAA5050 character-generator chip, colored character codes, and a 40-by-24 grid that allowed a full page to be stored in about 1 kilobyte of memory.
- •The BBC Microcomputer incorporated the SAA5050, enabling teletext-style display modes that were used by software including Granny’s Garden.
- •The author proposes adapting teletext into a ham-radio protocol as a digital counterpart to slow-scan television (SSTV).