[PPRAANet] Sending URLs in CW

[Douglas Hagerman]

Here’s an idea that may or many not have any merit.

The response from W1AW was that they could incorporate something like this if there were any sort of consensus about it, but they had never heard it mentioned before.

Comments.

Doug, W0UHU.


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Douglas Hagerman <douglas.hagerman at me.com>
> Subject: sending URLs in CW
> Date: 4February, 2014 at 9:42:23 PM MST
> To: w1aw at arrl.org
> 
> Hello.
> 
> I continue to enjoy the W1AW code transmissions, and listen regularly at 9:00 PM MST. Tonight, as on some other occasions, there was a URL included in the text, http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpmenu/latest.html if I caught it correctly. URLs were invented after CW became commercially stagnant, and it occurs to me that there may be an opportunity to improve the way this sort of “computer age” information is sent.
> 
> Basically the situation is that the receiving station operator is going along listening to standard text mixed with some numbers or call signs, but then suddenly there is this long, uninterrupted string of almost random characters. With a long string and no spaces to catch a breath, I find myself losing one or two characters in the middle. Unfortunately, like other computer-related text, the spelling of a URL has to be exactly correct. In lots of cases there is no way to guess any required fill characters, unlike regular plain text.
> 
> This difficulty could be eased. You know that you’re in a URL when you hear the “http://www.” part of the string, so you know there aren’t going to be spaces in the string. That means that the sending station could introduce extra spaces into the sequence without damaging the message. A potential convention could be to follow each “/“ with a space, which in most cases would give reasonable breakpoints. For example, instead of sending http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpmenu/latest.html
> the text would be
> http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ ftpmenu/ latest.html
> 
> This doesn’t always work. I see that the ARRL web site has a pretty flat structure, and long URLs. An approach that might work better in that sort of situation could be to put in arbitrary spaces. For example, instead of
> http://www.arrl.org/news/amateur-radio-disaster-response-in-philippines-winds-down
> the text could be
> http://www.arrl.org/ news/ amateur- radio- disaster- response- in- philippines- winds- down
> 
> Or perhaps the rule could be to put in a space at a fixed ten-character interval. That has a little bit of error-detection built into it, because you could see if you missed a character in the URL.
> 
> I suppose if CW were a commercially important technology, a situation like this would have been handled by some sort of convention handed down by Marconi or the FCC or somebody. How could a discussion of this be initiated within the ARRL? Perhaps a letter to QST? Or maybe it is a sleeping dog better left alone...
> 
> Thanks for your consideration.
> 
> Doug, W0UHU.