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

[Geoff]

Those with musical talent seem to make excellent CW ops, TX or RX.
While I can claim to have some, and it runs in the family, the person who 
often operated my station, Bob, KQ2M, was at the peak of my experience.

Id watch him sitting in the chair with a pair of TS-940's and 2 amps, 
running stations on one radio while logging on the keyboard and tuning the 
other station looking for new multipliers on another band. All the time his 
complete body is in motion to the beat of his internal music; he was trained 
as a classical pianist from an early age and was then in his late 20's.
He could keep this up for 42-44 hours of a 48 hour contest with just a few 
15-30 minute power naps at slow times. My wife or I brought the food to him 
and other than bathroom calls and some stretches he lived in the chair. 
After the contest was over we would go out for a nice dinner, a few beers, 
and then back and he would sleep 9 hours and be ready to drive back to NY on 
Monday. He regularly came in #1 or 2 in the USA and often set new records; 
an amazing operator.

I can have a conversation and have a CW ragchew but its plain text and 
anticipation of what is coming doesnt require 100% copy.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenneth G. Gordon" <kgordon2006 at frontier.com>
To: <Arc5 at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2012 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [ARC5] US Morse Exam History...Commercial versus amateur (OT)


> On 21 Dec 2012 at 20:39, Richard Knoppow wrote:
>
>>      The psycology of Morse is intresting: people who can
>> read very well sometimes have awful fists and vice-versa.
>
> That has not been my experience...so far. Although I am most certainly not
> the fastest code-copier in existence (30 wpm), I try to make my sending
> sound as perfect as possible, and I know many others who do the same.
>
>> Also, commercial ops could take traffic on a typewriter
>> while holding a conversation and have no idea of what they
>> were typing. I wonder how this works.
>
> I have heard of that sort of thing before. In fact, there is some fellow 
> over in
> the Seattle area who teaches high-speed code copying. He can copy two
> different messages from two different sources on two different 
> typewriters,
> one with his left hand and one with his right, at the same time while 
> holding a
> conversation.
>
> I have had some very minor experience at that: several times while I was
> practicing copying 5 letter code groups from NLK or one of the other Navy
> VLF stations on a typewriter, I caught myself unintentionally reading an
> article in QST magazine at the same time.
>
> When I realized what I was doing and looked at the copy, it looked 
> perfect. I
> was amazed. I know of others who do that as a matter of course.
>
> Then there was the story (possibly apocryphal) of the U.S. Army needing a
> message relay station set up in Africa somewhere. This was supposedly just
> before the U.S. invasion of North Africa. The techs who were sent to do 
> this
> were severely under-manned, yet the station was badly needed. So they
> grabbed every local they could find who was willing and set them down in
> front of a typewriter. These folks were told something like "hit this key 
> when
> you here this sequence".
>
> Within a relatively short time period, these folks would be taking traffic 
> on the
> typewriter all the while yapping away to one another in their native 
> language.
>
> Ken W7EKB
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