Posted by Dave W on May 14, 2001 at 18:34:36 from 194.222.52.34:
In Reply to: Re: Ransome's Art of Secure Communications posted by Dave Thewlis on May 07, 2001 at 01:07:01:
Dave, thanks for your comments, my view on the signalling still differs from yours for the following reasons :
I have asked a local radio amateur, with years of experience in radio morse communications, what he thinks about the signalling. Our conclusion is that if the signallers had been sending two-tone morse (frequency shift keying or what you will), although this might remove the characteristic time signature of each coded character, ie the pattern of longs and shorts, this would not obscure the characteristic element grouping structure of each morse-coded letter character. For example, in morse the letter A has two elements, the letter B has four, C also has four but not the same as letter B, D has three, E has one, etc., with each coded character being separated by a short time period from the element groups comprising the preceding and subsequent characters.
I think these aspects would have been noticed up by the S&A experienced signallers who all heard the signalling on a number of occasions, but it doesn’t seem to have registered with them that morse was being used.
For these reasons the use of morse coded characters doesn't seem to me to be the most likely option.
Regarding plain text/ coded, Miss Lee knew that Taicoon Chang was very ambitious and not to be trusted. For this reason I think there would have be occasions when she wished to communicate individually with one of the Taicoons, without the other knowing the content of the message. In such situations she would have needed added security, I suggest along the lines of the coding scheme in my previous posting, but for normal every day signalling the use of plain text, as you suggest, would have been adequate.
Even if we disagree over the above details I think we’ll probably agree that it’s AR’s skill as a writer that once again makes it difficult for us to decide if he was drawing on real life experience, or was creating a concept in his own mind.