Bill Sohl wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
KC8GXW previously wrote:
May 13th, the Tonight Show with Jay Leno will feature
a message sending/receiving contest between a cell phone text
messaging team and a Morse code team.
The Morse code team will consist of Chip Margelli K7JA and Ken
Miller K6CTW.

They utterly smoked the text messaging folks. The look on the
text-message guy's face when the receiving Morse op put up his hand
(signaling that he had the message complete) was priceless.
And the Morse ops weren't even going that fast...
73 de Jim, N2EY

Pretty much a no brainer that the text messaging would lose.

Then why did the text-message folks agree to the contest?

Sending text
from a cellphone is pretty clumsy and slow. After each character is
inputted
sender must wait a second or so for the character to be accepted and
for
the "cursor" to move to the next position indicating it is ready for
the
next
character to be inputted.

Not on my cellphone.

Also, different characters take several repeated
"pushes" of the key associated with that character to get to that
character...

Of course - but the same is true of some Morse characters, too.

Example: The letter 'S' is on keypad number 7 (along with P, Q and R)
and to get an 'S' into the text message you must hit the 7 button
four times
to cycle the character selection first to P, then to Q, then to R and
then
to S.

The text-message sender was the *world champion*. He's in the Guinness
book for 160 characters in 57 seconds.

Even after the text message is completed and sent, there is a latency
and
delay in actual delivery from the cellphone of the sender to recipt
at the cellphone of the individual intended to receive the test
message.

That didn't matter in this test because the text messager hadn't even
finished inputting the message when the Morse ops were done - with hard
copy (pencil and paper).

The audience was confident the text-message folks would win. They made
a heck of a racket but the Morse ops were unfazed.

Did you see the clip, Bill? You can download it from a number of
websites, in .wmv format.

73 de Jim, N2EY