Bill Sohl wrote:
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?

Obviously.

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.

You'd think the Guinness World Record Holder for text messaging
would have looked up the equivalent record for Morse code....

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.

You push a key that makes it accept the character right away.

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.

Sure. But look a letters like C and Y...

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)?

It's over 75 wpm.

The limiting factor experienced by the two Morse Code ops was how fast
the
receiving op could block-print with pencil on paper. They wanted to be
able to hold up the received copy so there'd be no question of
reception.

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
receipt 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).

OK.

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

No accounting for lack of knowledge on the audience's part.

Just made it more of a sporting course.

Did you see the clip, Bill? You can download it from a number of
websites, in .wmv format.
73 de Jim, N2EY

Haven't seen it myself...just heard about it this morning.

Try this one:

http://www.kkn.net/~n6tv/Text_vs_Mor...2005_05_13.wmv

It's an 8 MB .wmv file. Other sites have bigger files but they don't
show any more of the clip.

Best bet is to leftclick, then choose "Save Target As" so you don't tie
up the server. With dialup, that's about the only way. Worth the wait.

73 de Jim, N2EY