[South Florida DX Association] SOS For Ham Radio?

[Bill Marx]

Received from Bill Hellman NA2M.
-Bill W2CQ

SOS for amateur radio? The dits and dahs of Morse code are being heard less
and less, kept alive only by a dwindling number of amateur radio operators.


Charles Fulp, a dentist, sits at his ham-radio station in the basement of
his Perkasie, Bucks County, home.

By Michael Klein

Philadelphia INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Most days, when Charles Fulp is operating, people call him "Doctor." He's a
dentist with a practice in his comfortable stone house in Perkasie, Bucks
County.

This weekend, though, Fulp will operate in his cramped basement, and he will
be simply "K3WW," his amateur-radio call sign, as he chats with other hams
all over the world.

Fulp will be participating in a contest, practicing what even its adherents
acknowledge is a dying art:

Communicating by Morse code.

Dits and dahs - the short and long beeps that for 150 years told the world
of war, peace, rising stocks, sinking ships, new babies and dead soldiers -
are used regularly today by virtually no one other than a select group of
amateur radio operators.

And that group appears to be shrinking by the month. Workers at Western
Union, who moved 199 million telegrams in 1929 alone, have not tapped out a
Morse message for years. Heath, whose radio kits put many Morse operators on
the air, stopped making the kits by 1995. Two years ago, the International
Maritime Organization gave up Morse in high-seas emergencies in favor of
satellite radios. The U.S. military trains only a handful of people in
Morse, and only as part of specialized communications courses.

Even Fulp, who has won competitions that put him among the world's best
amateur-radio operators, concedes that the slow speed of code - perhaps
seven times slower than normal speech - has no practical role in today's
Internetted, cell-phoned, wired-to-the-hilt world.

The Federal Communications Commission, which licenses the nation's 740,000
amateur radio operators, has said as much. In April, new FCC rules will make
it easier to get a higher-class amateur radio license. Under current rules,
the speed for the lowest-class license, which gives an amateur comparatively
few frequencies on which to transmit, is five words per minute; for
higher-class licenses, which allow the ham to use more frequencies and
power, the requirements are 13 and 20 words per minute.

The new rules, part of the FCC's attempts to streamline the licensing
system, will set the speed for all licenses at five words per minute, about
three times slower than most amateurs use. (Fulp generally sends and
receives at 30 to 35 words per minute in contests.) Prospective amateurs
still must pass multiple-choice tests in electronics theory and practice.

"We believe that an individual's ability to demonstrate increased Morse code
proficiency is not necessarily indicative of that individual's ability to
contribute to the advancement of the radio art," the FCC announced in
December. Also, the world's licensing authority next year is due to decide
whether to keep Morse code proficiency as a condition of amateur radio
licenses, a requirement since the 1920s.

>From the reaction in the amateur community, you might have thought the FCC
was preparing to hand out amateur licenses for the asking, as it does for
citizens-band licenses. Since the great CB explosion in the early 1970s
("10-4, good buddy"), hams have generally viewed the 13- and
20-word-per-minute Morse tests as the gate that keeps riffraff off the
amateur bands, because the questions on the multiple-choice tests are widely
circulated and can be memorized.

But while hams seem to want Morse, most aren't using it, according to the
American Radio Relay League, the Connecticut-based organization that
represents about 175,000 American hams. From 1995 to 1998, surveys of its
members - who are seen as the more-active hams - showed that those using at
least some Morse code dropped from 54 percent to 46 percent.

"It's a fun mode," says Dan Henderson, who manages the league's contests.
"As far as a practical mode, though . . . " His voice trails off. "There
will always be a core constituency of hams who use it, but it's a dying art
from a technical standpoint. I still don't think it will ever go away."

The die-hards won't let that happen. "You put on your headphones and enter
your own little world," says Nancy Kott, a ham from Metamora, Mich., who
runs the North American chapter of Fists CW Club, affiliated with the
International Morse Preservation Society, which counts a few thousand
members. (If an operator has a good "fist," he or she sends code or CW, for
continuous wave, intelligibly.)

Ham operators who use Morse speak romantically of the dits and dahs skipping
musically along the synapses of their brains.

It is that passion that will keep Fulp poised in front of the glowing radio
transceiver in his basement for 48 consecutive hours this weekend,
exchanging call signs and signal reports with thousands of stations all over
the world.

In this weekend's contest, the idea is to get as many contacts, in as many
different parts of the world, as possible. He works alone; many other hams -
including those in the local Frankford Radio Club, one of the top contesting
clubs in the world - create multiple-operator stations so one operator can
sleep while the other plays with the radio.

To get a rough idea what a contestant hears in his or her headphones, put
four or five friends together in a moderately noisy room, close your eyes
(so you can't see their lips) and ask them to say their names in roughly the
same volume. Then, one by one, pick out their names and have a brief
conversation. Now, do that hour after hour for two days, and then remember
that a contestant is communicating in Morse code. "Once you get used to
[using Morse as opposed to voice], you'll find it's easier on the ears,"
Fulp says.

Because time away from the radio could cost him contacts, he eats little and
drinks virtually nothing except coffee and cold water. "One time, conditions
were so good I only got up twice the whole weekend," he says, jabbing a
thumb toward a bathroom eight steps away. During the major contests, other
dentists cover his practice. No abscess or impacted wisdom tooth shall
interrupt Dr. Fulp.

Fulp's great skill is not so much his ability to pick out call signs through
the interference, or his hearing, or the size of his antennas, or the power
of his transmitter. It is a combination of all those, plus his knack for
being on the right band at the right time.

Amateurs have six shortwave bands - portions of the radio dial in between
the AM and FM broadcast bands - from which to choose during a contest. Fulp
knows just when to switch bands and when to swing his antennas to where the
action is - south for South America and the Caribbean, north-northwest for
Japan, northeast for Europe, and east-southeast for Africa. When conditions
are right, a signal from 7,000 miles away can be louder than one from 40
miles away.

The beauty of Morse code in contesting is its simplicity. Call letters and
signal reports are the same in any language.



Morse code is a digital form of communication, a crude binary forebear of
today's lightning-fast digital transmissions. It was developed in the 1840s
by Samuel Morse, who sent a message over 35 miles of steel wires - "What
hath God wrought?" - and electrified the world with the ability to
communicate over distance.

"Information will be literally winged with the rapidity of lightning," a
Baltimore newspaper reported.

With the telegraph came a new industry that also gave millions of women the
chance for a career outside the home: pounding brass, as the act of pumping
a telegraph key became known, and typing out incoming messages. By 1871,
five years after a transatlantic cable linked the United States and Britain,
much of the world was crisscrossed by telegraph lines. By the end of the
19th century, as Guglielmo Marconi spanned the Atlantic with his wireless,
hams began setting up their own stations. (The origin of the word ham is
lost; one idea is that it comes from the call letters HAM of an early
wireless station, and another is that it reflects the Cockney pronunciation
of amateur.)

The "American Morse" that Morse wrought became the so-called international
Morse that operators such as Fulp and Kott use today.

Morse code carried the disaster of the Titanic's sinking on the night of
April 14, 1912. The ship's radio officers, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride,
sent "SOS" messages, which were picked up nearly 60 miles away by the
Carpathia, which steamed out to rescue 700 survivors, including Bride.
Phillips went down with the ship.

Though the use of Morse has sunk in more recent times, it still pops up here
and there in popular culture. The film Independence Day had earthlings using
Morse to confuse the aliens. On the WB show Jack & Jill last month, the
character Jill was tapping on a pipe to attract attention. He made four
short taps, followed by three long taps and four more short taps. He thought
he was sending "SOS," but Jack corrected him. Four short taps is an H, three
short taps is S.

Most observers believe that the new, slower Morse speed requirements will
attract more hams. They also believe that the newcomers, by and large, will
never pick up a telegraph key.

"It's not going to make any difference [on the bands]," says Fulp. "There've
always been less of us."

� 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.