[Boatanchors] code speed

[William L Howard]

>    In WWII, England had hundreds of monitoring radio sites listening
>to  the German military communications.  Most of the information was
fed
>to  Bletchley Park, the secret and famous code breaking installation NW
>of  London.   CW (Morse code) was primarily used for these
>communications and  mostly, maybe all, of the English operators were
>female.    I recently read that the MINIMUM speed required for the
>listeners was  90 wpm.  Was code being sent at that speed and could
>large numbers of  people copy at that speed?   As I struggle with my 5
>to 7 wpm, 90 sounds awfully fast. 73,  Skip M  W7WGM
-----------------------------------
One of the problems would have been that any operator can send Morse
faster
than he can receive it. An army signaler just has to bear that in mind
and
keep his speed in check. But if these ladies were taking messages from
agents in occupied Europe, they would have been dealing with some
lonely,
very nervous people.

I'll try and dig out our old Morse manuals to see what speed was
required.
SF was still using Morse for HF transmissions in the 1980s. I assume its
all
finished now with burst transmission ability.

Cheers
Mike Mitchell
---------------------------------
My Dad was a radio operator on B24's.flying out of England in late 1944
and 1945.  He was trained to send CW at 15WPM and receive at 30WPM. He
said that much of the limitation on receiving was the ability to copy
the code.  He was copying 15WPM with a pencil and paper.  He said that
much higher copying speeds could be done on typewriters.  90WPM is not
unreasonable if copying was done by typewriter.

Mike Lewis