Dave Platt wrote:

I don't know whether the legal prohibition against transmitting SOS on
commercial radio/TV still exists today, or whether it was dropped
during the big deregulation.

Yes, it was dropped a long time ago.

To answer another posting at the same time, the brand of cell phones is Nokia.
The default SMS alert is the morse code SMS.

BTW, it was never SOS as three seperate letters, the official distress call
___
was SOS (written with a line over it) the three letters run together such as
we do for SK.

It was in marine use preceded with a long dash (I'm not a marine operator
so I don't know how long) to trigger automated monitoring equipment,
but that was a relatively modern invention. (1950's??)

That way words like Sosnow (the name of my high school auto shop teacher)
would not cause a problem.

Geoff.


--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM