(October 4, 2020 at 3:57 pm)A. Secular Human Wrote:(October 4, 2020 at 8:45 am)onlinebiker Wrote: I was the guy sending it....
Seriously.
I have a high speed code certificate from the USCG.
35 words per minute send/rcv.
Impressive! I opted for semaphore for my First-Class badge in Boy Scouts...because it mostly made sense with patterns. Does that count? I found Morse to be more difficult to learn, without clear patterns. Yes, I know it has assigned shorted codes based on relative letter usage frequency, but that didn't make it any easier to learn.
In those days, I was thought to be a "nerd" or a "geek". Today, I'd probably have been identified as "on the spectrum". Oh, well.
I wish I had learned semaphore. It would have been handy if I had gone quartermaster when they got rid of the radioman rate. As it was - I got out of tge service. I did however try my hand at heliography. (Flashing lights)
It was a bit of a trip. "Translating" it in my head to sound.
We were in REFTRA (refresher training) and the quartermaster was for shit at it - so I got drafted to fill in.
The captain was impressed - because rather I actually called all the signals in proper phonetic alphabet. (Alpha, bravo, charlie rather than abc)
It's pretty cool watching an entire fleet manuever - excecuting turns in unison - with no radio....