Morse Code Tops 'texting' Options

[maxnmike]

Morse code tops 'texting'

BY MARIHA MCKAY THE RECORD (BERGEN COUNTY. N.J.)
It doesn't always work out this way, but sometimes older is faster.
'Two Morse code men recently bested a fast-fingered teen ''tex­ting" a message via cell phone in a high-profile digital duel that aired on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."
Another such contest, held by an Australian museum pitted a 93-year-old Morse code afi­cionado against a 13-year-old girl, and the oldster smoked his youthful rival.
There is something satisfying about a venerable 170-year-old technology beating out an up­start.
In the Leno showdown, ham radio operator Chip Margelli used Morse code keys to dit and dab the sentence "I just saved a bunch of money on my car in­surance" to Ken Miller, who re­ceived and translated. And like all Morse code experts, Miller didn't read the dots and dashes; he listened to the sound of the code the way you would listen to a foreign language.
Seated next to Margelli, Ben Cook, a Utah teen who recently won a contest ''texting'' a 160­character sentence in 57 sec­onds,
tapped the same message into a cell phone while a friend sat opposite ready to receive on another phone.
In the take that aired as well as two others, the Morse code duo handily beat the teens.
Full disclosure here: Text messaging always seems te­dious to me.
I don't like punching tiny phone keys four times just to get the letter "s" on my cell phone screen.
Teens who have grown up using instant messaging on their PCs are more inclined to use text messaging, and carriers are undoubtedly pleased with the 10 cents they typically collect for a maximum length 16O-character message.
Text messaging, which is wildly popular in other parts of the world, is finally gaining a critical mass in the United States. Several years ago, wire­less companies began to allow inter-message exchange, letting Cingular customers, for exam­ple, send and receive messages from Verizon Wireless cus­tomers and vice versa.
Cingular boasted 4.4 billion text messages delivered over its network in the first three months of 2005, a figure that in­cluded plain text as well as ring-tone downloads and other forms of data.
Wireless carrjers recently began a system that lets users receive Amber Alerts issued when a child is kidnapped ­over their cell phones in the form of text messages.
No question that may prove to be a good use for the technology, and there are others, but so far, the most popular uses for text messaging seem to border on the frivolous. More than 40 mil­lion text messages and data downloads were sent by people voting for their favorite "Amer­ican Idol" during the show's re­cent 12-week season, according to Cingular.
Those figures dwarf the world's estimated 2.5 million amateur radio operators, most of whom have basic proficiency in Morse code, which can take several months to learn.
The two code experts who ap­peared on TV wore white shirts and green visors a la tele­graph operators of yesterday­and brought publicity to a tech. nology that evokes a passion in its adherents
''There's magic to it," said Allen Pitts, spokesman for the National Association for Ama­teur Radio. ''That's something that cell phones are never going to match."

[bozodog]

dit and dab.... lots like 0's and 1's huh?