Thursday, May 14, 2015

Code..

Speaking of amateur radio reminded me of this:

Fort Huachuca bids farewell to Morse code training | Article | The United States Army

The thing is, what was taught at Ft. Huachuca (my alma mater) was morse intercept.  That is, "ditty chasers", the continuous wave (as we call it in the ham radio world) version of what I did in the Army.

(When I enlisted their MOS was 05H, and they gloried in the nickname "Hogs." They would grudgingly accept being referred to as "Oh 5 Aytch". I knew one once who insisted that he was an "oh 5 Hotel", and no one trusted him. Even after the MOS was changed to 98H, to coincide with the rest of us SIGINT Geeks, the old-timers still insisted on being called "Hogs.")

Apparently, while ditties still need chasing it is no longer a full-time job, and will be taught as a secondary function, by the Air Force at my other alma mater, Goodfellow AFB.

On a related note: Interesting facts about Samuel Morse and the Morse code - Life and style.

Oddly, to me, they don't mention that what we call Morse code is not what Samuel Morse devised, which was just numbers. 1 Development and history

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