Indeed, some commercial stations required the operators use company-provided bugs with the weights welded on the pendulum to hold the speed down in the 15 WPM range.
The reason was money. More traffic could be handled at 15 WPM than at high speeds in a given amount of time, thanks to far fewer "fills" needed, and the ships and their owners were the customers; the last thing a shore station operator wanted to do was intimidate or irritate a ship's radio officer. I've talked with a few guys who talk about how they roared along at high speeds, but they were operators on some rare, private, closed circuit (often military) where the same two operators passed traffic to each other day after day. I worked a military CW circuit too for the Army in which I worked the same guy(s) daily and I would get a nasty complaint from the commanders via RTTY if we got much above 20 WPM even if we were solid copy. They didn't want to have trouble when a new operator suddenly sat down at one end. Soldiers must be fully interchangeable. That's what G.I. (government issue) means when applied to the military. Smart commercial operations are that way too. The *last* thing they want is to have their profit and performance dependent upon a few hard-to-replace people. Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- Alan Bloom wrote: > Many years ago, a friend was listening to a couple of the QRQ boys on > the low end of 40 meters having at it at 70 wpm. Chuck recorded them on > the reel-to-reel tape recorder at 7-1/2 inches per second and later > played them back at half speed. He said that during the entire QSO > neither one of them ever got the other's callsign correct. :=) Many believe that marine radiotelegraphy back in the "good old days" was moderately high speed. In fact, it wasn't at all. We ran our wheel at 18WPM which is what W1AW uses for bulletins I think. All the operator afloat had to be able to copy was our and his call signs. He could look the QSX up. Traffic was essentially always handled slower ... 15WPM or below. Press was normally sent at 18-20, it didn't require letter perfect copy. Fists afloat ranged from pretty good to totally awful. Vibroplexes were notoriously hard to slow down to the common speeds. See radiomarine.org/historic-5.html for one ingenious example. 50WPM is fast enough for me. 73, Fred K6DGW ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
