"Bill Sohl" wrote in message
ink.net...
wrote in message
ups.com...

Bill Sohl wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
KC8GXW previously wrote:
May 13th, the Tonight Show with Jay Leno featured
a message sending/receiving contest between a cell phone text
messaging team and a Morse code team.
The Morse code team consisted 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?

Failure to consider the details? There's no accounting for stupid
decisions or apparently the Text Messgae
champion didn't do his homework. If he had, he'd know
morse code experts exceed his own 160 character per minute
Guiness World Record rate.

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.

There must be some default delay.

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.

But three dits for an S is still likly faster than a cellphone keypad
response.

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.

Thats roughly 32 wpm. No real threat to many "high-speed"
morse code folks. Isn't the morse code record well over 50wpm
(50 wpm = 250 characters/min)?


The official record is over 70wpm (see The Art & Skill of Radiotelegraphy)
and that would be a blazing 350+ characters per minute.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE