Dick Carroll wrote in :



Dwight Stewart wrote:

"Mike Coslo" wrote:

Dwight Stewart wrote:

Isn't Code more of a skill than a knowledge? Any
person can look at a piece of paper with a code
chart on it and translate code, but that doesn't
mean they have the skill to send or receive code
over a radio. Wasn't the latter the ultimate purpose of the code
test?

One must know the Morse code to send and recieve it.

You're right. Perhaps memorizing the individual sequence of sounds
associated with a letter of the alphabet is knowledge on some very
basic level, similar to a young child memorizing the sounds associated
with the letters of the alphabet. Amazing that this would become a key
focus of testing in ham radio for so many years.

\


Mygawd, Dwight, are you really licensed as a ham? And *that's* all you
know of radiotelegraphy?
You been hiding out in the wilderness somewhere, in a cave? What do
you think it was that started
radio in the first place, semaphores?



Phone goes back a long way. Yes, Marconi started out with Morse code, but
AM was only a few years behind.

There was phone even when people used spark. A circuit patented by Elihu
Thomson to keep arc lamps burning was adapted by Prof Duddell FRS to keep
a spark going continously for this purpose. This type of transmitter was
used by DeForrest in his famous voice coverage of the yacht race from New
York harbour. His 'Audion' (triode) was not used in the transmitter as
most assume, but in the regenerative receiver used to pick up his spark AM
signals on shore. This was because he hadn't figured out that it could be
used to amplify, so it predated TRF receivers even.

Even before DeForrest, the first transmission of AM over one mile took
place on Cobb Island, Maryland, on December 12, 1900. The system was
designed by Fessenden, a Canadian whose research was funded by the weather
service in the US. He used a spark gap driven by a high frequency
alternator, commonly used to produce Morse at several kW of RF back then,
but he had an 80 kHz alternator specially made for him by Poulsen, another
pioneer in his own right. By exciting the gap with an alternator running
at a frequency _above_ audio he was able to make maybe a kW of AM, whereas
the Thomson/Dudell design made far less power (a few watts). Unfortunately
he had to rely on some sort of rectifier with no amplification or
regeneration for the receiver, hence only being able to hear a kW of AM no
more than one mile away.

Moving on just a couple more years, the earliest published circuits I have
seen for continuous wave transmitters, such as those by John Scott-
Taggart, show a mic as well as a key. They would, of course, as phone was
known for spark transmitters. CW, of course, originally stood for
continuous wave in the sense of 'not spark', and was applied to AM as well
as Morse. I do use that kind of CW!