Subj : CQ CQ CQ
To   : DENNIS SCOTT
From : Don Vally
Date : Sun Mar 12 2023 02:27 pm

-=> Quoting Dennis Scott to Don Vally <=-

 DS> Re: CQ CQ CQ
 DS> By: Don Vally to RON KINNEY on Thu Mar 09 2023 11:35 pm
 
 > I was a morse intercept operator in the Army...
 > 
 > CQ IMI K
 > 
 > Cougar
 > 
 DS> Hello Don, 

 DS> May I ask, what was "a morse intercept operator"?

Hi Dennis - sure!  In the US Army my MOS was 05H which the Army
described as "Performs detection, acquisition and exploitation of
foreign communications employing International Morse Code and simple
printer systems in a tactical or strategic environment."  Whew! that
was long winded.

Basically I was trained to intercept morse code being sent by
foreign governments.  I sat in a radio shack and searched the bands
for specific morse traffic.  I was trained to intercept chinese cut
characters, but ended up copying east bloc traffic. 

These messages were always encoded, so unless I copied a cleartext
code word, the job entailed listening to morse in front of a
teletype printer and hitting the keys as I heard the characters.
Always in groups of 5 characters with 5 groups then a spacing and 5
more groups of 5 characters.  Of course I would always get the tail
end IMI SK.

I just copied the morse, someone else worked to unencrypt the 
messages.  Doesn't sound very exiting right?  Training for this was
INTENSE. Took longer than 6 months depending on the trainee, and
there were a lot of drop outs.

When I got out of the service, I tried to find a job sending or
receiving IMC, but the only place that really used it was the
maritime service. That didn't pan out.

Sorry for the long winded reply...

Cougar
aka Don


.... He who dies with the most TAGLINES wins!

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20
--- SBBSecho 3.14-Win32
 * Origin: CJ's Place, Orange City FL > cjsplace.thruhere.net (1:123/160)

.