Ron wrote: >The "press" was sent from punched paper tape, I believe. It ran > at a very steady 20 wpm.
Hi Ron, Coast Station WCC in the 1970s sent a nightly news/sports/financial broadcast in the 1970s at somewhere around 30 wpm. It was great practice, and interesting too. Coast station NAM during the same era was sending weather and NAVAREA/HYDROLANT broadcasts, intended primarily for Naval Sealift Command civilian-manned vessels, at a consistent 25 wpm that was very easy to copy due to the perfect machine-sent nature of the keying. I have to figure that, even though the second class telegraph license didn't require speed greater than 20 wpm, most candidates copied well above that before setting for the exam. I found the random code group exam at a paltry 16 wpm to be far more difficult to pass, since at least 80 consecutive random characters had to be copied without error during the five minute run. Five errors spaced just right would send you down. >A really fun book documenting the adventures of "Sparks" - marine >radio operators - is "Sparks What's Going On" Sounds like a great book. I'll have to track that one down. It's so aggravating dealing with the foreign currency issue, though. The RSGB a few years ago was selling a memoir of a British radio officer of the 1970s and 80s. I don't remember the title, but it was well worth reading as a description of the late soon-to-be-gone era of commercial Morse. In the very early 1990s, a lot of commercial telegraph license holders were sent a solicitation from one of the radio officer unions looking for candidates to filll open billets. I guess there hadn't been too many new recruits to an obviously dead-end career! >Sylvester also published some CD's containing actual examples >of CW on the High Seas between ships and ships and shore >stations. It includes an actual SOS call that, to this day, still >produces a chill when I hear it. That would be very interesting! I've talked to merchant radio officers who completed lengthy careers without ever hearing a real SOS. Was it sent ...---... or ... --- ... ? It's surprising how many have the misconception that it's sent with a space between the S, O, and S, rather than the proper method of sending it all as *one* character. In fact, even the USAF's automatic emergency code keyers (AN/ARA-26) that were attached to most USAF airborne HF sets in the 1950s and 1960s were designed to send SOS incorrectly as three separate characters! 73, Mike / KK5F _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
