[NJARC] Good Story from Page 1 of Monday's Wall Street Journal

Wed Oct 10 19:37:36 EDT 2007

That's Great! I am trying to teach myself Morse,
albeit slowly at the moment. I have a jury-rigged
trainer- a radio shack piezo buzzer, 9vt battery and
key. Works well, and sounds real. Just have to start
following my directions from the 1944 CAP cadet
manual! lol I want to be able to CW when I get my
license and ham shack setup.

Scott

--- john ruccolo <jr6v6gt at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Visit our web site - See http://www.njarc.org
> _______________________________________________
> Tapped out? Arizona retiree aims to write new
> chapter
> for Morse code 
> 
>         NOSTALGIC FOR SIMPLER days, retired
> astrophysicist Chuck Adams is
> translating classics of boys’ literature into a
> language he fears is going the
> way of kit radios and marbles: Morse code.
>         Holed up in his high-desert home crammed
> with
> computers, radio receivers
> and a very patient wife, Mr. Adams uses homemade
> software to download online
> books with expired copyrights, convert the typed
> words
> into Morse code tones and
> record them on compact discs he sells on the
> Internet.
>         So far, Mr. Adams says he has sold or
> donated
> thousands of Morse
> versions of such novels as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
> “At
> the Earth’s Core,” Daniel
> Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” and H.G. Wells’s “The
> Time
> Machine.” In about an hour
> his software can take any book in the public domain
> and turn it into a string of
> digital dits and dahs; last weekend, he turned out a
> version of F. Scott
> Fitzgerald’s - .... . / -... . .- ..- - .. ..-. ..-
> .-.. / .- -. -.. / -.. .- --
> -. . -.. (a.k.a., “The Beautiful and Damned”).
>         For the 65-year-old Mr. Adams, it is a labor
> of love, mixed with equal
> parts hope and despair. “Morse code is going to die
> off unless you can talk
> someone into coming into the hobby,” he says.
>         “I do it because it’s fun, and to keep it
> going,” he says. Then he adds
> in the next breath: “But I have no delusions of
> grandeur that I can save Morse
> code from extinction. I’m not Don Quixote. I’m not
> going to go out and fight
> windmills.”
>         Mr. Adams grew up in Wink, a blink of a town
> in West Texas. About two
> meters tall himself, he shared a small bedroom with
> his three younger brothers,
> each of whom is even taller. He hand-built his first
> bike with parts from a
> junkyard and flew model rockets high above Wink
> while
> the Soviets flew Sputnik
> even higher.
>         And, at the age of 15—inspired by his
> father,
> a ham-radio operator—Mr.
> Adams taught himself Morse code from a book. At the
> time, ham operators had to
> transcribe Morse code at a rate of five words per
> minute in order to earn the
> most basic federal license. Soon young Mr. Adams was
> spending every night
> sending coded messages to anyone who could hear
> them,
> and eavesdropping on UPI
> news dispatches broadcast to ships.
>         Many other radio amateurs use voice
> transmissions, but Mr. Adams
> preferred code, because of the challenge—and because
> he thinks his voice is too
> high and his West Texas accent too twangy.
>         Mr. Adams completed a Ph.D., won tenure at
> the
> University of North
> Texas, worked high-powered jobs in the defense and
> computer industries, and
> dabbled in the professional poker circuit. But he
> never lost his love for Morse
> code.
>         The code is the creation of a painter,
> Samuel
> F.B. Morse, who needed a
> way to transmit messages over the telegraph that he
> and Alfred Vail had
> invented. In 1844, the men famously sent a
> transmission from Washington to
> Baltimore that read, “What hath God wrought?”
>         The telegraph soon replaced the pony
> express.
> As late as World War II,
> ham operators found themselves using their Morse
> skills as radiomen in the
> military. During the Vietnam War, Jeremiah Denton, a
> prisoner of war who later
> became a U.S. senator from Alabama, blinked
> “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code when
> his captors put him on television.
>         But over time, the telephone and satellites
> have rendered Morse code
> almost obsolete. “If the satellites go out and power
> goes out, Morse code can
> still get through,” says Nancy Kott, president of a
> code club called
> FISTS—someone who sends good code has “a good fist.”
> “All we need is a battery
> and two wires to tap together, and we can
> communicate.”
>         In February, the Federal Communications
> Commission eliminated the Morse
> requirements for ham-radio licenses. Mr. Adams
> resigned from a ham-operators
> organization because of what he saw as its flaccid
> defense of Morse code.
>         “It is a sad state of affairs when the U.S.
> doesn’t even attempt to keep
> the language alive or give an incentive to work on
> it,” says Mr. Adams.
>         Many of those who still know Morse code test
> their skills with a German
> computer game called Rufz, the standard for
> determining world
> transcription-speed rankings. Players listen to
> coded,
> five-character call
> signs, combinations of letters, symbols and numbers
> that identify individual
> license holders. The faster and more correctly they
> type them, the more points
> they score. (Transcribing regular text is much
> slower.)
>         Last month in Belgrade, Goran Hajosevic
> broke
> 200 words per minute—an
> extraordinary pace. Mr. Adams is tied for eighth in
> the world, at more than 140
> words per minute.
>         Scanning the list recently of the 60 fastest
> Morse coders under the age
> of 20, Mr. Adams spotted just two with
> American-issued
> call signs. “What this
> shows me is in the United States, we have no one
> who’s
> interested in learning
> Morse code anymore,” he lamented.
>         Mr. Adams and other Morse aficionados don’t
> speak of dots and dashes;
> that imagery is too visual, and Morse is an aural
> language. So they prefer to
> describe the language in dits and dahs, the sounds
> of
> the short and long tones.
> A, for instance, is dit dah. B is dah dit dit dit,
> or
> simply dah dididit.
> Between two letters, the sender allows a three-dit
> silence. Between words it
> grows to seven dits.
>         Like all Morse experts, Mr. Adams rarely
> breaks signals down into
> letters, instead hearing complete words much as
> readers recognize words on a
> page. When he transcribes a message at high speeds,
> his fingers are five or 10
> words behind his ears. When he is “in the zone” he
> isn’t even conscious of what
> he is transcribing, he says. He has to read it later
> to understand the message.
>         When he listens to one of his books, the
> code
> is like a voice speaking
> to him. “It’s like you don’t count the i’s when
> someone says Mississippi,” he
> explains.
>         He produces his audio books to play at
> different speeds, depending on
> the expertise of the buyer. Ken Moorman’s bedtime
> listening is Mr. Adams’s
> 25-word-per-minute version of “The War of the
> Worlds,”
> which he purchased for
> $10.50. “It’s so much easier to pick up a microphone
> and yell,” says Mr.
> Moorman, a 65-year-old retired electrical engineer
> in
> Williamsburg, Virginia,
> and a coder since 1957. “The people who do [Morse
> code] today do it because it’s
> a lost art.”
>         Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent Barry
> Kutner, a 50-year-old
> ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pennsylvania, and
> another world-class coder, a
> 100-words-per-minute version of the book. To Mr.
> Adams’s chagrin, Mr. Kutner
> wrote an email back pointing out that the gap
> between
> words was eight dits long,
> instead of the prescribed seven. At that pace, a dit
> lasts 1.2 one-thousandths
> of a second.
>         Much as he did growing up in Texas, Mr.
> Adams
> enjoys sitting in front of
> a gray radio, not much bigger than a hardcover book,
> and sending code with a
> $500, Italian, stainless-steel, paddle-style key
> that
> he operates with a
> pinching motion. With the slightest touch of his
> right
> thumb on one paddle, the
> key sends an audible dit, or short tone. A touch of
> his right pointer finger on
> the other paddle sends a dah, or long tone.
>         His wife, Phyllis, 62, doesn’t begrudge him
> his long hours in front of
> the radio. “I’m just glad he has something to keep
> him
> busy,” she says. “All my
> friends with retired husbands complain they follow
> them around the house all
> day.”
>         One recent Sunday morning, Mr. Adams’s radio
> came alive with Morse
> tones. It was a guy named Gary McClain in Pryor,
> Oklahoma. The transmissions
> were pretty slow, just 22 words per minute.
>         Mr. McClain, a 65-year-old retired mill
> worker, learned Morse code in
> the Boy Scouts half a century ago. He had nothing
> urgent in mind; he just wanted
> to make contact with someone far away.
>         “Weather here is cloudy and chance of
> showers,” he tapped, as Mr. Adams
> transcribed the words in a notebook.
>         Mr. McClain signed off, and the radio went
> silent. “It will eventually
> die,” Mr. Adams mused. “I’ll hate to see it go. I
> won’t have anybody to talk to.
> I’ll have to go back to reading.”               
> 
> -end-
> 
> 
>        
>
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