Station Y

When I was at college, I shared digs with guys from the Brunel Tech in Bristol who were studying Marine Radio. At the time, they still had to use Morse and this was a large part of their work; sending and receiving. It was all very well sending as they quite liked that but receiving was difficult because they had to recognise "words" made up of five random letters. The sender hated doing this as he had to try and keep the speed consistent. They used to use tapes and it was seeing the man who runs "Station Y" at Bletchley Park using a tape to test a visitor who purported to know morse, that reminded me that I had actually written a program to "play" the Morse for random groups of five letters at any desired speed. This was probably the first time I had ever written something that was used practically. Since then it has been in the back of my mind to write a program which could actually recognise Morse code. Maybe I should learn it first as the only thing I can transmit is "SOS" oh and "SMS" because the ring tone on lots of mobile phones when they receive a text message is the Morse code for "SMS". At first I thought this was a pager linked to one of our systems and that they had programmed "SOS" wrong. I think I have heard dash-dot-dot-dash on a record by David Sylvian. Excuse me while I look that up. ......... It's the letter X - rather appropriate. Thinking back I suspect that the whole bit of Morse code on this record was QSX - The Q-Signal for "Will you listen on .....". And of course, Mike Oldfield played "**** Off RB" in Morse on Amarok (RB being his old boss at Virgin Records).

I need pictures don't I? The entries have been rather straight for some time now.