Stephanie, VA3UXB wrote: I don't think I ever got the hang of the prosigns... I got the AR. To me, BT is a dash (-) but I don't know if that's correct or not. I sometimes get the ',' and '?' confused. The / character I know well, because I always hear it on our local repeater ident, and it it's in my beacon's ident (va3grr/b).
But.... how can you tell an ES from the letter H? The other ones, the AR, BT, the / character, all have 'unique' sounds when you hear them, right? Isn't ES the same as 'h'? Or am I completely lost? ---------------------------------------- Excellent point, Stephanie! All prosigns are sent as a single character and indicated, for the sake of simplicity, as letters that, if sent without the normal space, will produce the prosign. All prosigns are chosen so they won't have the problems you mention. This is a list of the prosigns I'm familiar with: AR ----- End of message AS ----- Stand by BK ----- Invite receiving station to transmit BT ----- Pause; Break For Text KA ----- Beginning of message KN ----- end of transmission CL ----- Going off the air (clear) CQ ----- Calling any amateur radio station K ------ Go, invite any station to transmit KN ----- Go only, invite a specific station to transmit R ------ All received OK SK ----- End of contact (sent before call) VE ----- Understood (VE) AV ----- Warning SOS ---- Distress Although it can't be shown here in ASCII, a prosign is identified by a line or bar above the letters. You'll hear most of these on the Ham bands although some, like VE or AV and especially SOS will be very rarely heard. In addition to prosigns we have actual Morse characters for the arcane characters on our keyboards. These are NOT "prosigns" but simply combinations of dots and dashes like any letter of the English alphabet or number. (My apologies for getting careless with terminology and calling the ampersand a "prosign". That's not right. Hang on. I'll get back to that). I say English because, of course, there are many other languages that have corresponding Morse codes such as the 70-odd characters used for Japanese or the various odd characters used to represent diacritical marks and special letter combinations in other European languages including Hebrew. I won't even get into Arabic and Cyrillic. In many countries, Hams have to learn and be proficient in two or three "Morse Codes" to get a license! Here in the USA, commercial operators recognized a group of characters for the various symbols found on a common keyboard. These were codified by the ITU for use in commercial communications by Morse. We Hams use some of them almost daily, such as the period, question mark, comma and solidus (slash). A few more are: + (plus sign) di-dah-di-dit-dah = (equal sign) dah-di-di-dit-dah (We Hams use that for a dash a lot but as dash is really) - (dash) dah-di-di-di-di-dah " (quotation mark) di-dah-di-di-dah-dit ' (single quote) di-dah-dah-dah-dah-dit _ (underscore) di-di-dah-dah-di-dah $ (dollar sign) di-di-di-dah-di-di-dah There are more. There's probably one for the Euro by now <G>. Now THOSE you won't fine in common use on the Ham bands, at least not in any QSO I've heard! That is except for our "pause" when we often use the = sign. As Kevin Rock, KD5ONS, mentioned that some characters we use commonly came from the old American Morse that used variations on spacing and element lengths that don't occur in Continental or International Morse code. Dit, di-di-dit is one of those. Sent as E S it is the ampersand. Another very common one that is fading from use because of the popularity of keyers is the American Morse zero - the long dash. I'm sure others with far more background in the American Morse, Continental Morse, and various international codes will have more to say. Ron AC7AC _______________________________________________ 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
