"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in message
...
PH5E wrote:
Okay, thanks Richard. I was a bit confused by all the
merges and
take-overs... Nice to see the company has some really old
roots.

It's important to note that when Marconi first tried to
market his invention
he was laughed out of the country (Italy). Marconi's first
backers were
British. Therefore it was a long time before you would
find a Marconi
"wireless" on an Italian ship, the company would not sell
to them.

As a little history, Marconi used the letter "M" for
callsigns, so that's
why Great Britan has both the "G" and "M" prefixes,
although it has only
been very recently that they started using M for ham
calls.

The Titanic's call sign was MGY. Before sailing it may of
had a different
callsign, I was told that once, but have recolection of
who said it or
where (sorry). Or for that matter, what they actually
said.

Like all telegraphy companies at the time, Marconi used
codes to reduce
the amount of sending in each message, they began with the
letters "CQ".

That's where "CQ" came from as a calling signal, it meant
calling all Macroni
stations, or with a callsign calling Marconi station Mxx.
There were others
starting at CQA, but the most famous one is the fourth,
which was supposedly
assigned that way because it was the fourth one they made
up, not for
any other reason, "CQD", "calling Marconi stations, I need
assistance",
or in plain English "HELP!!!".

The Marconi radio operator in New York City who received
the Titanic's
distress call was a young boy named Sarnoff who later
founded RCA.

Geoff.

While Sarnoff was involved with the reception of Titanic
distress signals he was not the sole operator and later much
exagerated his role. He was very good at self promotion. See
the biographical artical at Wikipedia which appears to me to
be pretty accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sarnoff



--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL