Posted by Andy Clayton on September 29, 2007 at 12:05:26 from 83.104.41.160 user cousin_jack.
In Reply to: Re: How to signal in MORSE code posted by Mike Field on September 29, 2007 at 00:54:13:
As a kid, my brother was very keen on the navy and signaling. He had two toy aldis lamps for a while and also a Sam Morse battery driven telegraph system. We tried to use these to communicate over distances and between rooms but I could never get the hang of it. The clicks and the flashes all blurred together and translating the peceived patterns into words just generated gibberish. I don't think we (I) really studied it enough. It would have been great to do if we'd practiced suffiently to get an ear tuned in.
I did hear of it (morse) being used quite successfully on mountain-tops by surveyors in pre-radio days. As the observations were often carried out at night to lamps, simple codes were flashed to the other peaks such as 'ML' for 'More Light' 'LL', 'Less Light, 'GB', 'Good-Bye' (ie observations to you complete). In this way the team members didn't have to be proficient in morse but could learn a simple patern of flashes for each required action. However, there was an anecdote I heard that some of the surveyors were ex-navy and were expert signalers. These guys could hold conversations between peaks by lamp flashing. On one occasion a complaint was received at Southampton survey HQ from a passing merchant ship, quietly steaming between the Scottish islands, that the language being broadcast was less than 'Gentlemanly'! A diktat was subsequently issued from on high that future transmissions should be restricted to the task in hand.