[CW] Fwd: SUPER-BUG by UA3AO

[Richard Knoppow via CW]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "D.J.J. Ring, Jr. via CW" <cw at mailman.qth.net>
To: "Kate Hutton" <katehutton at gmail.com>; "CW Reflector" 
<cw at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2014 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: [CW] Fwd: SUPER-BUG by UA3AO


You can see the method of making dashes better in this video 
his made of
one of the original keys as was used by the best Soviet 
telegraphers during
World War II and after.  He sends entirely in English (did 
you understand
the other was in Russian, or that UA3AO was sending poor 
English with too
many errors?).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g6z7-d1fiI

This second key was made by Soviet Russian machinists for 
the elite group
of best high speed telegraphists.

Even the best users of bugs run into a speed barrier where 
they cannot make
faster dashes, this results in what I call "Flight Radio 
Officer" or "South
American" sending as it was very popular there, I can hear 
the difference
between that and Erie Canal or Great Lakes swing (Click here 
for TWO
recordings of W0BMU, Howard "Tex" Harvey
https://archive.org/details/W0bmuHowardtexHarveyW0bmu ) 
sending which is at
a slow speed and is just a "Morse Dialect" where the dashes 
are always
longer and just not at high speed.  The best operators can 
send beautiful
code up to about 35 wpm but any faster most of them send 35 
wpm dashes and
40 or 50 or &c. wpm dashes - the dashes are too long or way 
too  long.
 Also what happens in Flight Radio Officer sending is since 
the dashes
don't match anyway, the operator sends them at 25 wpm so now 
you have 40
wpm dots and 25 wpm dashes.  They knew what this was because 
at night and
the land stations did it also especially at night for 
"operator to
operator" information that wasn't a Telegram.  For telegrams 
everyone
settled down and sent about 27 wpm with well shaped code.

Don't miss the W0BMU recording.  Tex lied about the age 
requirement to get
a job as radio officer on a Lake Erie Barge memory tells me 
it was about
1923 (Tex died around 2005 or so), he still had the Blue 
based Vibroplex
Blue Racer he used in the early 20s. which had the call 
signs of the
various barges he used - all four letter call signs, I seem 
to remember
they were inverted from the "W calls East of the East Bank 
of the
Mississippi River, K calls to the West of the Mississipppi 
River rule of
broadcast stations which also shared the four letter call 
sign group:  KAAA
to KZZZ and WAAA to WZZZ.  There were some errors in 
broadcasting like KDKA
in the East and WOAI in the West.  I never proved this that 
K was from the
East Coast and W was from the West Coast when it came to 
ships.

Don't miss Lery's demo to me.  I did not see what was so 
special about his
key, I never even saw his fingers hit the paddle on the 
right, but with the
slow numbers in the video above I could see it, and now when 
I watch for
it, I see it in the newly made key he just had made for him.

The W0BMU or the other recordings at 
http://www.tinyurl.com/djringjr/ are
well worth listening to.

73

DR

    The story is that ship calls were four letter and the 
East and West call  K and W assignments were reversed from 
land stations. Supposedly KDKA got a call intended for a 
ship.  I also have  not been able to find any substantiation 
of this although it may have been true. One would think the 
old ITU directories would show it but the only one I've ever 
been able to find is from the 1960s and its difficult to 
tell what the ship's port of registration is.
     Early radio station licenses were issued by the 
Department of Commerce and later the Federal Radio 
Commission.  There are records on the FCC web site showing 
the early broadcast assignments.  KDKA was the first 
_commercial_ license issued, that is as opposed to 
experimental calls.  About a dozen licenses were issued late 
in 1920. KDKA was the first and Westinghouse also got WBZ 
and WJZ, which were number 2 and 3 (by memory)  and KYA 
(Chicagor originally) another of the first dozen or so.  At 
the time three letter calls were issued to land stations.  I 
also do not know when the convention of issuing three letter 
calls to land stations and four letter calls to ship 
stations started but many early ship stations also had three 
letter calls.
     Because of the discontinuity caused by WW-1 and the 
govenment siezure of all radio stations it is very difficult 
to assign any prioity to broadcasting other than following 
the war.  However, the first expeimental braodcast seems to 
have been made by Reginald Fessenden using a modulated arc 
and high power carbon microphone.  This is all a bit OT on a 
CW list:-)


--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk at ix.netcom.com