Posted by Ed Kiser on May 14, 2009 at 16:50:29 user Kisered.
In Reply to: Re: one hoot - turning to starboard posted by Jon on May 14, 2009 at 13:28:06:
Jon -
The Boy Scout uniform, with the round patch on the right shoulder and the narrow strip on the left, which nicely serves as reminders of which side is DOT and which is DASH, is a concept that for some reason, never occurred to me before this. Maybe someone did explain that to me when I was in the scouts, but that item has slipped from my memory. At 74 today, those Scouting days are quite a few years ago.
The method used to send a dot or a dash is really of importance only to the sender and receiver, as both have to agree as to what means what. One of the fun items about all this is coming up with yet another way to send those signals. Perhaps just squeezing the hand will do. Blinking the right eye, or the left, also serves. Waving a fork to someone at the far end of the dinner table works too. The method used is really a function of the distance between sender and receiver. The two flag method in your referenced signaling manual is all very well when done between two stations that are perhaps a half mile apart, whereas blinking the eye at that distance is not going to work. Signalling from one mountain top to another with those two flags could make good use of some good telescopes for both parties. Perhaps that would be better with a single large flag, but that could become tiresome moving that much weight back and forth.
So the method used needs to be right according to the distance, and with full agreement of the meanings between the two parties.
One of the surprises we Scouts found out in trying various methods of signalling is just how far a simple flashlight (torch to some of you)can be seen at night. Of course, it helped if there were no other lights nearby. And it helps if the sender points his light directly at the receiver.
Jon, that reference regarding signalling was quite a resource, even though it was oriented to a naval environment which is probably not all that useful across a dinner table. Thanks for bringing that source to our attention.
I was hoping that somewhere in that reference work would be a description of TAPPING as a mode of sending Morse. The problem here is being sure thst there is no ambiguity as to what was meant to be sent. Banging hard for dash and lightly for dot can become confusing as to "was that a big or little bang?"
In MISSEE LEE, Captain Flint, a prisoner down below decks on that pirate ship, was able to communicate with Nancy by banging, but even there is no description of the type of banging used to distinguish between dot and dash, but what ever it was, apparently it made sense to Nancy, and was able to reply in kind. Would like to know what is the "official" method of Morse via banging, whether it be knuckles on a table top, or a hammer on a bulkhead. What we were taught in the Scouts was a pair of bangs, very close together, was a dash, while a single bang by itself was a dot. The length of pause between bangs determined the concept of "end of letter" or "end of word." It certainly reduced the confusion resulting from ambiguity. But I do not know where that definition came from.
In today's technology, there is the concept of the "double-click" on the mouse that is an example of the two bangs close together being a dash, however back in those days (mid to late 1940's) there was no such thing as double-clicking a mouse to serve as an example.
In SWALLOWDALE, John was up on the Lookout Rock, using his telescope to view Holly Howe, and saw some figures moving about on the lawn, and he considered the possibility of actually being able to signal with a light to Mother from that rock, as that would remove the need for Native Post to serve as they were planning to do. I felt that they really missed a good chance there for some distance signalling, but perhaps he felt that to do so would involve Natives and perhaps not just the Native they wanted to talk to, so they did not do it. Wish he had at least tried it. In his thinking about that possibility, there was no question as to whether Mother knew Morse or not, so it seemed to be assumed that she knew it well enough to communicate.
To signal Holly Howe from the top of Kanchenjunga would be a lovely long distance signal, but as they were there in the daylight, no flashing of light would serve, and Mother would not have wanted them to be way up there in the night anyway.
Ed Kiser, Kentucky