[ARC5] US Morse Exam History...Commercial versus mateur (OT)

[Mike Morrow]

Carl wrote:

> At sea there was little to do besides PM's and the occassional simple repair 
> so my ET2 boss and the EMO authorized me to become an "official" backup 
> RM...in writing. The RM's said I had a distinctive banana boat swing that 
> was very easy to copy and I was asked to send occassional over the air CW 
> practice on one of the assigned fleet frequencies.

That's pretty impressive, Carl.  I never came across in my USN days an ET
who was in effect cross-rated with an RM.  That had to a satisfying position
to hold...not only the maintainer, but a skilled operator as well.  What
was the name of the ship?

By the mid-1970s most ballistic missile submarine radiomen were themselves
typically little skilled in Morse.  OTOH, they had assumed the maintenance role
that ETs would normally have performed on other vessels.  Their radio room was
more akin to a crypto communications computer center continuously processing
the output from several VLF AN/BRR-3 receivers on 14 to 30 kHz.

Just as I was leaving the USN in the late 1970s, someone in the hierarchy of
Atlantic missile submarine command decided that missile boat radiomen should be
proficient in Morse.  The thought was that, should the boats ever actually perform
their design basis and release 16 Poseidon missiles (each with 10 to 14 MIRVs),
it would be unlikely that the sophisticated communications systems used before
the exchange would still be functional afterwards.  Less sophisticated modes
using Morse might be valuable.  That concept still seems very logical to me,
but I don't know how long it lasted nor how widespread it was.

The Morse proficiency of submarine radiomen in the Cold War was not very
much greater than character recognition at a speed less than five wpm.  Even
the division RMCS was not at all fluent.  An officer from the Engineering
department who was a ham was assigned the duty of getting our RMs Morse
proficient.  I was the only other ham on board, but I was leaving.  I heard
later that he was reasonably successful.  The skills were never needed,
fortunately.

73,
Mike / KK5F