On Jan 9, 7:50�am, Steve Bonine wrote:
K6LHA wrote:
As to a typical non-amateur-communications service, an old Teletype
Corporation teleprinter cost less than a quarter of the annual salary of
a skilled morse code specialist and had a service life of at least 10
years. That was before WWII...but it applied just after WWII as well.

This is a little like saying that the reason commercial shipping moved
from wind power to engines is that they could have a smaller crew.

Ahem..."One word: WIND." :-)

The change from wind power to machine power meant that all could plan
any sea voyage ahead of time, greatly improving schedules plus being
able to accurately factor in costs of fuel and the "burden" equivalent
to keep the crew paid and fed.

Cost is only a minor part of why commercial communications
services stopped using cw.

I have to disagree. What is hardly ever brought into amateur radio pep
rallies is the enormous court costs involved in lawsuits over manual
telegraphy errors. This was in the 1870 to 1920 time period for the
most part. Didn't matter whether a telegraphy service was at fault or
not, the court costs and news of alleged bad operation cost some
telegram serivices considerable cash.

It is generally an implicit premise in amateur radio higher- speed
manual telegraphy that skilled morse operators are "perfect." There is
no such thing as "perfection" and one missed character, just one, can
have terrible consequences to a company receiving the message with just
one error when a commercial code was used.

Note: It was common in the time period I mentioned for some telegrammers
to use commercial code books of five-character combinations which cost
them just one word to send. Bentley's Commercial Codes was one such
"code book" published in various editions. Anyone with the same code
book could "decipher" the message content so cryptography was not a
factor. Just one single character mistake could make a "code book"
telegram mean something else entirely.

Consider that telegraphers were human and needed physical breaks and the
typical railroad station telegrapher (seen in so many "western" movies)
worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week, and for little money. In urban areas
later, where electrical power was available round-the-clock, one
relatively unskilled operator could tend at least 10 to 20 teleprinters
(needing only paper and ribbons in their daily needs). One maintenance
person could work one shift to tend 10 to 20 teleprinters of the 5-level
type. Teletype Corporation consistently made low-maintenance
teleprinters including 8-level "ASCII" types. Teletype didn't advance
well into electronic terminals and competition with lower-cost,
higher-speed electronic terminals and paper printers was too much for
them.

While I'm nostalgic about the end of cw in the world of
commercial radio, that has nothing to do with my feeling about
its use in ham radio. One of the things hobbyists do is
aintain expertise in skills that might otherwise be lost
forever.

Understood. But there is PLENTY in commercial communications that has
been "lost forever" at least in practice. The website

http://www.hallikainen.org/BroadcastHistory/

has an enormous quantity of information about ALL communications, not
just radio broadcasting. Hal Hallikainen (WA6FDN) dubs his website
"Saving History from the Dumpster" and that dumpster is HUGE. :-)

'Radio' is only 113 1/2 years old. The technology has changed well
beyond three magnitude plateaus in that a-tad-over-a- century time.
Amateur radio can no longer use "Spark" transmitters yet they were once
the overwhelming majority transmitter types. Few radio amateurs can
make DXCC using just diode-detector receivers of the coherer or
galena-crystal type. :-) LF alternators were the first TRUE CW sources
but those were always prohibitively expensive for all but millionaire
amateur hobbyists. Today the ARRL has yet to make a serious push to get
LF amateur bands other than the limited experimental permission to use
"600m." Several European nations have amateur bands on LF. shrug

Even the venerable "Teletype" has gone the way of dumpsters except for a
very few USA amateurs. The more-correct name of "Data" now encompasses
largely-electronic, solid-state terminals, either stand-alone or as
program modifications of PCs. Anyone looking at the mechanical
complexity of electro- mechanical teleprinters (and in reading their
maintenance manuals) will find they are far more complex than
stand-alone electronic terminals. But, "Teletypes" are all physical and
out-in-the-open and therefore "more undertandable" to some folks who
have very little experience in electronics.

I enjoy the mode, and it still has plenty of application
in my hobby. If others don't enjoy it, fine.

Excellent attitude in my viewpoint!

... I'm not going to denigrate my fellow ham because
they don't care to operate a mode that I happen to enjoy.

Even BETTER! I just wish that were the main attitude in the USA but, by
example, it does not seem to be so.

73, Len K6LHA