[CW] New Morse code character

[David J. Ring, Jr.]

But at least it is a new code character.

Fortunately, all International telegraph work was restricted to the 26
English alphabet and 10 numerals, period, comma, slant, question mark,
semicolon, colon, minus sign (or hyphen), equal sign (BT), plus sign (AR),
left parenthesis (KN) and right parenthesis (KK), apostrophe, and quotation
marks, and a few "procedural signals" like "Starting Signal" (KA), Wait
(AS), and Error (HH).

I think I have them all - but perhaps someone will find one I missed!

We could represent arithmetic functions by using the minus (DU), or plus
(AR), fraction bar (DN) and for multiplication we simply used the letter X.

Odd symbols like @ were represented as "CIRCLE-A", � would have been
"CIRCLE-C" and so forth.

Other symbols that were on teleprinters (usually on the FGH shifted letters)
were "national" symbols, and varied from country to country.  In the USA,
Western Union teleprinters had $ as one of those characters, while the
international carriers such as RCA and ITT did not have these characters -
they would be blank.

One unfortunate thing did happen with the advent of Teleprinter especially
in the Maritime Service.  The United States Coast Guard had Teletype� Corp.
machines, and those machines were set up so that FIGS S rang the annunciator
bell at the printer, while internationally FIGS-J was the bell ringing
character.  Many ships have connected (and perhaps still do!) to USCG
teleprinter circuits from sea, and are unable to attract an operators
attention because of this.  (I had this happen many times until I saw a USCG
try to ring my bell with FIGS-S.)

When messages were sent onward from a manual (or teleprinter) circuit, they
were sent as "CIRCLE-A" if such was sent, and also with just the 26 letters.
Accented letters were sometimes "hinted at" by adding an extra E (or
whatever letter was accented) to alert the reader that the word should be
read with an accent, but only when it would be ambiguous with only the
single letter.

Other languages, like Chinese were put into morse code by sending them as
numbers, and there was a standard "look up book" to translate between the
number groups and the Chinese pictograph.

Probably the National Traffic System will keep it's AT group - which is fast
and unambiguous.

Other countries have their own varieties of morse code - the Japanese have
what is called Wabun or Kana Kana code which is very melodic to my ears.  I
used to listen to JCS in Japan send out Wabun messages by the hour when I
sailed the Pacific.

73

David Ring, N1EA
-30-



----- Original Message -----
From: <Ku4uk@aol.com>
> I think I can send ( AT ) about as fast as AC.
>
>