"Jeff" wrote:

So given a typist of comparable proficiency to the Morse operators (
meaning probably in the region of 80 - 100 wpm) it is most likely that the
text message would win the race; depending on system delays, which again is
not a fair comparison to face to face Morse. You could wait for hours, or
days, or even years for the bands to open to a particular location!!

It all goes to show that you must compare like with like. I am sure that the
Morse operators would have also lost if they were forced to send extraneous
letters as they cycled through to find the correct one, as the text'er had
to.



Ultimately, we need to treat these various modes as methods of
sending text - no more and no less. Two methods that send the same text
are competing modes, regardless of whether keyboards, a telephone keypad
or a telegraph key is used to send it. A method that sends those blocks
of text faster and with fewer errors is better. A slower, more error
prone method is inferior. Not all encoding schemes are equal. Some, like
ASCII, encode the entire alphabet, including upper and lower case.
Others, like ISO-Latin-1, can encode even more characters. In general,
the more inclusive encoding method is better. An encoding scheme that is
easily adapted to error correction (parity, automatic re-send, etc.) is
also considered better. So claiming that phones, data modes and Morse
can't be compared because they are somehow "different" ignores the
ultimate reason for their existence - text communication via radio.

--
Klystron