Jim Hampton wrote:
"K=D8HB" wrote in message
nk.net...
One interesting thing of note - text messaging I'd consider
similar to cw in one thing - it may be fun, but not highly
useful.

I disagree!

They're both highly useful. Just in different ways.

If one
needs to send a lot of text, a computer and the Internet just
might be
considerably faster (assuming one can touch type at a
reasonable rate).

Of course! But then you need a readout device.

Usefulness depends on the application.

Via
radio, there are digital modes, of course, and text can be
reliably sent
much faster with many of the digital modes (even the very dated
RTTY).

Sure - if someone has the equipment handy.

But the whole digital-mode-faster thing is kind of bogus in my view.
It's like saying that since we have cars, there's no reason to have
competitions where people run anymore. Heck, why doesn't everyone in
the Olympic marathon use rollerblades? The times would drop
dramatically.


I have to chuckle at the length of this thread; I thought it
an interesting
link and figured there would be a couple of cw detractors that
would answer,
but the thread turned out a bit longer than I figured. I keep
forgetting
how heated the cw vs no cw arguement can get.

The telling part is that the anticode folks call the test "rigged"
and other nonsense in an attempt to discredit what happened. But
the plain simple fact is that a couple of good Morse Code
operators, going about 1/3 the world-record speed, were faster
than the *world record holders* in text messaging.

What they missed is that the whole point of the segment was to
show that "newer" isn't always "faster/better/easier" and that
"older" doesn't equal "useless". The outfits on the two teams
were a visual way of adding to that.

One member of the Morse Code team was reportedly at Dayton
in his telegrapher outfit.

I'd have responded earlier, but yesterday was my birthday
and .... well, I
probably consumed enough beer to build a 160 meter half wave
beer can vertical

Hope it was happy. Trouble is they put beer in aluminum cans now...