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If you had to use CW to save someone's life, would that person die?
And ever so slowly we creep up on the *actual* point....
pick a freq, pick a mode, pick a language, pick a moment in time. *Nothing* is perfect and CW or no CW, it's about circumstance, not code. Then again, you can back it up one more and acknowledge the foolishness of the whole CW argument. As it stands, hams are so crazy they somehow think they are the only hope for mankind. I pray that farce never becomes fact! Everything has it's place. Ham radio is a novelty. CW is a novelty within the same. That's all.... As long as there are 40wpm ops out there that can't program a radio, it's just a bunch of ding-dongs arguing amongst each other, looking like a bunch of ding-dongs. And it goes both ways.... no reason to ditch CW but this "my tapper is faster than your tapper" stupidity is just phallic and pathetic. Which finally brings us to the overall problem... As usual, the last word in any hammy hashing is the same. Control freaks needing to feel in control, and the subject matters not. That's why these goofy threads carry on forever. rb "Dave Oldridge" wrote in message 9... "Woody" wrote in news:1o2Hg.19713$Te.3938@trnddc07: "Dave Oldridge" wrote in message 9... "Woody" wrote in news:%RJGg.27319$uV.13889@trnddc08: Did someone drop you on your head at birth? The reason 50wpm can save lives is probably a bit complex for you to get both your functioning neurons around, but believe me, having done CW for a living for some decades I do know that it can save lives. And if you're faster than the average bear at it, you can tell someone on the scene things they need to know all that much faster. Possibly, because try as I might, I can't really remember much about that day.... I had pyloric stenosis, if that counts? So apparently YOUR answer to this question is that you couldn't send your name if your own life depended on it. Now that's true... I'd require a CW setup of some kind in order to send my name; or anything else for that matter. Or as previously pointed out, hack up a headphone jack and tippy tap the wires together. Either way, I don't see my life depending on it at any time, so I'll just let my CW skills continue to rust. However; your argument does make me wonder how non-hams even have a chance at life in this world... ?? Believe me, I get it. I don't think CW ought to be mandatory and it isn't where I live. I do think people who intend to use it should learn how to use it properly, though. For CW to be effective, both operators must be competent. IF they are, they can often transcend barriers of language that only digital modes can get over. In my own case, the fact that I could read CW and read written Spanish a bit once enabled me to render aid to a burning fishing boat. (There were other more routine examples of where the language barrier was crossed by CW--many messages I copied were not in English at all, but were readable by their end recipients). OK.... so by your own words, CW still didn't save a life... CW mixed with bad Spanish passed a message. So now we'll have to add a Spanish test. Thanks a lot. My point is, my bad Spanish might not have recognized the word "fuego" if it was spoken fast among a lot of other words. But on CW it came across loud and clear. As for the language thing.... I can copy voice language and hand it off to another native just as easy and they'll figure it out too. No CW necessary. Except you'll be a lot slower because you'll need phonetic spellings for everything. Believe me, I know. I've done this. For a living for many years. BTW, I noticed you conveniently left out the specific year in which said burning boat was offshore with an obsolete CW outfit, and how your CW expertise put out a fire.... but I'm guessing we're talking many a year ago, so again, a moot point. Not that long ago, really. Early 1990's if I remember. Actually, The boat thing in general is really killing me... If these numb-nuts are offshore and not on the correct USCG freqs and/or unaware of how to properly tune their radios in an emergency, then it isn't CW saving lives, it's the grace of God that somebody happened to be on their freq at that time. But again, what boats are out there with a CW rig???? That's crazy, bubba. :-) rb This was on 500khz (and 484). CW was the mode of operation on those frequencies until well into the 90's. Cheap SSB radios were plentiful. So were some SITOR lashups. But what finally killed it was INMARSAT. So now, instead of getting nailed by solar flares on HF, you get nailed by them on INMARSAT and have to wait 6 to 9 months for a new launch. Meanwhile you're limping along on SSB using a phonetic alphabet to send traffic at a SLOWER rate. -- Dave Oldridge+ ICQ 1800667 |
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