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New club for Morse enthusiasts
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 |
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