Any Ham Radio Operators?

[pdcorlis]

Well done Steve & O'C - simple and to the point. Some of us old dogs even hold "legacy" licenses... for example I'm an "advanced" class US ham even though that class has been eliminated. Think of me as an endangered species...

[Old Hippie]

Avatar speaks for itself

I've got one of those old J-38s in the collection. I try to rotate all the keys through service, even the crummy rusty old beat-up bent-up clunker that is attached to an ancient telegraph sounder board. If the keys could talk, I wonder what they'd say? "Lemme rest, darnit" probably.

And for CdnSushi:

You've heard about the radio guys. There are also a bunch of guys (and gals) who keep old-fashioned wire telegraphy alive. If you have seen old movies with scenes in train stations where the telegraph "sounder" is clicking away, that's the kind of thing I mean.

The wire telegraph was often originally a branch of the postal service in many countries. Railroads used the telegraph to coordinate trains going both ways on single tracks. The standardized time zone system came about because the railroads needed to know when trains were going to be where. The telegraph was also used by commercial message services, Western Union among them. Railroad telegraph also carried commercial messages -- most Canadian towns had a Canadian Pacific wire office where people could send telegrams.

Old-fashioned stock-market tickers were a kind of telegraph, as were old fire alarms and police call boxes in the days before officers carried radios.

The telegraph system used most (there were several) was invented by Samuel Finley Breese Morse and his partner Alfred Vail. The code used to transmit messages over the wire is called the "Morse Code," though there is considerable evidence Vail invented the code. Vail made the first key for sending the code, known as the "Vail Correspondent."

The code used by radio amateurs and professional radio operators is "Continental Code" because it was invented in Europe for use on the telegraphs there, including the submarine or undersea telegraph. It is made up of dots, dashes, and spaces which are combined in various ways to make letters, numbers, punctuation and so on. It is generally received by listening to an audio tone in a radio receiver. (Old undersea telegraph was decoded with a sensitive metering device that could sense tiny voltages.)

Morse Code is made up of dots, short spaces, long spaces, short dashes, long dashes, and longer dashes. It is received on a mechanical device called a "sounder" which taps out the code, with a "click-clack" sound. (The sound of the beginning of a dot or dash is different than the sound of the end, so you know -- with practice -- what's going on.)

Where amateur radio operators have a "call" that tells where they're from, wire operators have a "sine" (the misspelling is intentional) that identifies the "office" where they work or is their own private identifier if they work with other operators. The telegraph is long defunct in commercial service, but a number of us around the world keep it going, putting the Internet to work to carry the clicks and clacks of the telegraph.

Kinda like ol' Grandad driving Junior's sports car, I suppose.