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Amelia Earhart Search Forum => Radio Reflections => Topic started by: John Ousterhout on December 21, 2011, 09:46:51 AM

Title: 'ES' in Itasca log - reference to 'also in Morse Code' - explanation
Post by: John Ousterhout on December 21, 2011, 09:46:51 AM
Richie (and anyone else interested):
"ES" is a Morse-code abbreviation meaning "and" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_abbreviations), so the interpretation would read "North and South"
Also, when quoting a document, don't add anything new inside the quotation marks.  The line quote does not say "157 337 LOP".  It confuses things when you add "LOP" to the quote.  Even if you think it is obvious that the 157 337 numbers refer to an LOP, that is an assumption, although a pretty safe one.  Even so, it is important to keep track of what is known, and what is assumed.  Additional information may change our assumptions, but not what is known.
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: richie conroy on December 21, 2011, 12:39:55 PM
thx marty i get it now  :) i was unaware the ES was morse code  :o
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Martin X. Moleski, SJ on December 22, 2011, 08:11:41 AM
thx marty i get it now  :) i was unaware the ES was morse code  :o

It's not so much that it is Morse Code as that it is an abbreviation derived from the Morse Code tradition.

Having become accustomed to using ES as an abbreviation while transmitting and receiving code, the radio men used it as an abbreviation in their logs, too.
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Gary LaPook on December 22, 2011, 01:47:47 PM
thx marty i get it now  :) i was unaware the ES was morse code  :o

It's not so much that it is Morse Code as that it is an abbreviation derived from the Morse Code tradition.

Having become accustomed to using ES as an abbreviation while transmitting and receiving code, the radio men used it as an abbreviation in their logs, too.
"ES" in Morse code is . ...  one "dit" followd by three "dits."
"AND" in Morse code is .-  -.  -..   " dit dah"  "dah dit" "dah dit dit"  so these types of abbreviations save a lot of time. Another one is "DE" instead of "FROM"   -.. .  compared to  ..-.  .-.  ---  --   

gl

Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Harry Howe, Jr. on December 22, 2011, 03:12:46 PM

And, in the course of developing his code, Samuel F.B. Morse studied the word usage and thus the letter frequency of use distribution for the English language and assigned his dot, dash accordingly.  Thus the most frequently used letter "E" was assigned "." dit, the next most frequantly used "D" was assigned "." "."" dit dit", "S" was assigned "." "." ".' "dit dit dit"  etc.

A genius at work.
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Harry Howe, Jr. on December 22, 2011, 03:22:04 PM

Sorry, In my last post I said that "D" was ".." dit dit.  that is incorrect  D is -.. dah dit dit
I forget what ".." is.   
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Gary LaPook on December 22, 2011, 05:24:37 PM

Sorry, In my last post I said that "D" was ".." dit dit.  that is incorrect  D is -.. dah dit dit
I forget what ".." is.
That's an "I"

The letter "E" makes up 13% all by itself. The next most frequent is the letter "T" representing 9% which is a single dash in Morse code.


The most frequent letters in English, in order of their frequencies, are E T A O I N S R. The mnemonic for remembering this list of letters is "A sin to err."
In Morse code they are    E .   T -  A  .-  O  ---  I  ..   N  -.  S  ...  R .-. which are short compared to say Q --.- or Z  --.. 

gl
Title: Re: The Last Takeoff Footage.
Post by: Harry Howe, Jr. on December 22, 2011, 07:46:55 PM

A bit of Morse trivia.
Prior to the development of the "Code", words were assigned bumbers and the word-number association was noted in a code book which each telegrapher had a copy of (there weren' a lot of them).  The sender would look up the word and send it's number, the receiver would receive the number and look in his book and  write down the word.  Worked allright I guess;

Then a guy named Alfred Vail developed a frequency distribution of letter usage in the English language by looking at the number of each letter in the type cases of his local newspaper.  Using this letter distribution He and Morse assigned dots and dashes to each letter, thus developing the "Morse Code".   Clever.