Quote:
Originally Posted by M0FYA Andy
I'm always intrigued why they speak in 'shorthand', so for example the shipping forecast might say "rain from West" where the ordinary weather forecast would say "rain from the West". Is it because at some time it has been sent in something other than speech, for example in Morse?
Andy
|
Imagine yourself with your ear pressed to the radio speaker, at midnight, on a small craft rolling and pitching, with only a dim light to write by and scribbling down the information given out.
I was never on anything as small as a fishing boat, but even on a reasonable sized ship it could get tricky at times, and add to that reception difficulties.
And the regular shipping forecast was also transmitted from coastal stations and Portishead by morse and radiotelephony. R/T for vessels below 1500 GRT that were not required to carry a radio officer. It used to be a bit of an ongoing game with sparks whereby if we could hearthe shipping forecast on the BBC, we'd have it written down and pinned up in the chartroom before sparky came in from the radio room with his copy, often nicely typed on a marconi telegram form whereupon he would ceremoniously tear off our handwritten version and pin up his "official" one. All in good humour for the most part and one must remember it wasn'y always possible to pick up the LW BBC signal, so the R/O was an invaluable link.
Ahhhhh happy days.
A.