[KCDXC] @ Issue: Long Code for a Small Symbol

[Reicher, James]

>From the NY Times, 4/15/2004

73 de N8AU, Jim in Raymore, MO




By MARK GLASSMAN

Published: April 15, 2004


The French say petit escargot; the Dutch call it a monkey's tail. On a
qwerty keyboard, it's Shift-2. And next month, amateur radio enthusiasts
will call it dit-dah-dah-dit-dah-dit. That is when the symbol @
officially becomes the newest character in the Morse code.

"As far as we know, this is the first change to the code in at least 60
years," said Gary Fowlie, a spokesman for the International
Telecommunication Union, the arm of the United Nations that will oversee
the update, which is to become official on May 3. "There is a need for
it."

In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse sent the first Morse code message over a
long-distance telegraph. The phrase "what hath God wrought" traveled
almost instantly from Washington to Baltimore.  Later the code was used
by the military to transmit messages over radio frequencies.  Today, a
handful of ham radio enthusiasts communicate in Morse code as a hobby
and also use it during power failures.=20

"This is one of those technologies that never really dies completely,"
said Elliot Sivowitch, a museum specialist emeritus for the Smithsonian
Institution who specializes in radio communications.  But with the rise
of e-mail, Morse code must reckon with the @ symbol, which is essential
to every e-mail address.=20

Ham radio hobbyists use Morse code to exchange e-mail addresses on the
air so that they can trade files or lengthy Web addresses, said Rick
Lindquist, the senior news editor at the American Radio Relay League,
the largest association of amateur radio enthusiasts in the country.
"Most of our members have e-mail capability," he said.

Until now, those ham operators had to spell out @ with two letters of
code: "A," a dot followed by a dash, and "T," a dash.  The resulting
sound is "dit-dah-dah," which also translates to the letter "W."  Now
the @ symbol is transmitted by combining the letters "A" and "C" and has
a sound not shared by any other single character.

"The irony is that sending the word 'at' is shorter," Mr. Lindquist
said.

By about half.  Each dash is three times the duration of a dot, and
within a single character, the space between sounds is one dot long. So,
the word 'at' takes nine beats, or dots; the @ symbol takes 17.  How
radio hobbyists respond to that difference will determine the popularity
of the symbol over the word. So far, the word appears to be winning.

"I think they designed it wrong," said Herb Sweet, the treasurer of an
amateur radio club in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "I have a hunch that people are
more than likely to just go A-T - dit-dah-dah."

Mr. Sweet's wife, Barbara, is also a member of the club. In 1976, Mr.
Sweet brought home a ham radio and installed it in their bedroom. Mrs.
Sweet had just purchased an electric knitting machine, so "there was
nothing I could really say," she said. Today, she is the president of
the club.
Ham operators will probably learn the symbol but may opt not to use it,
Mrs. Sweet said.

The Sweets live minutes from the Samuel Morse Historical Site, which
sits on a Victorian-style garden estate in Poughkeepsie called Locust
Grove. "He's right down the road here, Samuel, F. B.," Mrs. Sweet said.
"We go by him every day."

Locust Grove offers an introductory course in telegraphy for children
but has not incorporated the @ symbol into it, said Andrew Stock, the
curator of education and public programs. "It's an interesting factoid,"
he said. "It probably won't be part of our programming."

Mr. Stock said his course was designed to give children a quick primer
on sending messages in Morse code and that the sequence for @ was beyond
the scope of the lesson.

Many Morse code users learn punctuation to earn their radio licenses but
ignore it later, during actual communication. "There are symbols for
things like the semicolon," said Larry Price, the president of the
International Amateur Radio Union. "But not one in a hundred Morse
operators could even tell you what the character is, because they don't
ever use it."=20

Sal Citrano, a retired Navy radio man who served during World War II,
said that punctuation was rarely used in federal transmissions at sea.
"Military messages used to come in five-letter words," he said. "There
were no commas, dashes or anything."

Mr. Citrano, 78, spent five months in radio training school in Newport,
R.I., before boarding a transport bound for Normandy. He listened to and
decoded the Morse code message sent by James Forrestal, the Secretary of
the Navy, on Aug. 15, 1945, informing his ship that the war had ended.
Today, he has a valid radio license but spends little time on the air.
"Now that I have a computer, I'm not active," he said.