KXBill wrote: The practice of cut numbers dates back to WW2, maybe further. After that, it was a common practice on commercial circuits.
--------------------------------------------- I've held a commercial CW license since the 1950's. While I wasn't working as a commercial CW op all the years since, I do have experience with army, marine and aircraft CW operations and have listened to the traffic on those bands over the years. I sure never heard the use of such abbreviations used on any of those circuits. In both services it was absolutely mandatory to ensure 100% perfect copy of messages, and non-standard characters were carefully avoided. What was carried forth into radio usage was the old land Morse symbol for zero, which is a l-o-n-g dash. Lots of Hams and a few commercial operators have used that since the earliest days. Since modern keyers won't make the proper long dash, I have noticed many (most?) Hams simply substitute a "T" for a zero. That's FB if there's context for it such as PWR HR 1TT WATTS, just as RST 5NN is pretty clearly 599. Still, I'd have been in deep doo-doo if I had tried to use that sort of thing on the Army nets, and while I occasionally heard it from a shipboard operator on the marine bands I never used it there. I'd bet if you asked the FCC if it was legal to use "cut numbers" for your call sign you'd find that you are asking for a citation for failing to identify properly. Some military and government circuits in which the same ops were on watch at the same times and only passed traffic between themselves or between a regular consistent small group of ops may have developed some special usages. Those are also the exceptions who often became speed demons running at 30 or 40 wpm. But they were a very exclusive and small club. It's possible that some of them developed special characters, but they were definitely not "normal" commercial usage. The marine bands and the bulk of the commercial circuits were very careful to use only standard international Morse for maximum efficiency. Requests for "fills" cause delays many times longer than the time lost using standard characters, just as we were careful to work at the speed of the slowest operator. On commercial merchant marine frequencies and on the army nets we seldom got over 20 wpm, and very often had to follow a shipboard operator on a straight key at 10 or 15 wpm. After all, back then we had to *communicate* by CW. We couldn't log onto the internet and search the databases to figure out what the op meant by a call sign sent using a strange assortment of dits and dahs that didn't fit any known call sign format. We had to stop everything and ask for fills if the op didn't know enough to do it "right". Ron AC7AC _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
