"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in message
...
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
Geoff,
A series of twelve four-second dashes, spaced one second apart, was sent by
an automatic keyer on 500 kHz. Any automatic distress receiver in the
vicinity would be triggered to operate an alarm after picking up four
dashes. The extra dashes were to overcome atmospheric noise and increase the
chance of the signals being picked up. Four consecutive dashes meant that
the automatic alarm wasn't triggered too often in the tropics.
The Radio Officer would be woken in his cabin by a bell and had 2 minutes to
get to the radio room and switch the main receiver on to receive the
distress message. Sometimes the alarm would go off half a dozen times in a
night during storms around the European coast in winter. Didn't get a lot of
sleep for several days sometimes.
Regards
Mike G0ULI