QSO vs Chat

foggycoder

foggycoder

Super Member
QSO
  • A simple exchange of callsign, name, location, and signal report
  • Highly ritualised
  • Much repetition (which tells you a lot about the standard of copying!)
  • Can extend into exchange of weather and rig. This verges on chat (in that there's no repetition) but rarely proceeds beyond this information, as if the weather and rig are part of the QSO protocol
Why oh why do we pass our callsign (and his callsign) so often when there's just the two of us active on the frequency?

CHAT
  • Informal subject matter, not necessarily related to radio topics
  • Almost no repetition
  • Use of a much wider range of abbreviations and acronyms
  • Reduced use of callsigns - often just a "K" at the end of an over
  • Emphasis on to-ing and fro-ing
  • Typically lasts much longer than QSO
The lack of repetition means that copying has to be very reliable.

My point is that a very much higher standard of copying is required for chatting and it therefore has to proceed at a slower speed than one could cope with on a QSO. Guys learning morse often have the aspiration to chat but find even a QSO harder work than they were expecting from practice with random words or code groups.

If our aspiration is chatting, should we learn morse in a more targeted way? If so, what way would that be?
 
REPETITION

Although I've been an amateur CW operator for only a year now, I have been a professional voice operator for 40 years. In my professional life, we used:
  • the phonetic alphabet and numbers
  • a very limited vocabulary
  • standardised phraseology
  • read-back of important information (to confirm it had been received correctly)
But repetition was almost never used.
(Yes, the audio quality was usually very good. But frequencies were often busy with multiple operators, some of whom had a very poor grasp of English. The downside was that the system was not set up for "chat" - anything non-standard soon ended in a request for a repeat!)

With written English, there's a lot of redundancy - if you miss a letter in a word, it often makes little difference to comprehension, especially when considered in the context of the message as a whole (how many times have you listened to an operator repeating a misspelt word, knowing what his word is anyway?).

But CW operators love abbreviations and contractions (OM, FB, K, 73, SK, BTU, etc, and the Q-codes) which have no redundancy at all - miss out a letter and the meaning has usually vanished (although there is some positional context in a basic QSO). Hence the reason for several repeats of important words. And (repeating myself from my previous post!), why oh why do they repeat their call-signs over and over again even though there's only two operators on the frequency?! Those repeats make a nonsense of the purpose of abbreviations - to reduce the amount of characters sent and so speed up an inherently slow means of communication. I therefore find the enthusiasm for repetition amongst CW operators rather curious.

So why do modern amateur CW operators repeat abbreviations and contractions, when sending in plain text would get the message across first time?
 
foggycoder said:
But CW operators love abbreviations and contractions (OM, FB, K, 73, SK, BTU, etc, and the Q-codes) which have no redundancy at all - miss out a letter and the meaning has usually vanished (although there is some positional context in a basic QSO). Hence the reason for several repeats of important words. And (repeating myself from my previous post!), why oh why do they repeat their call-signs over and over again even though there's only two operators on the frequency?! Those repeats make a nonsense of the purpose of abbreviations - to reduce the amount of characters sent and so speed up an inherently slow means of communication. I therefore find the enthusiasm for repetition amongst CW operators rather curious.

So why do modern amateur CW operators repeat abbreviations and contractions, when sending in plain text would get the message across first time?
Click to expand...

I don't think I've heard what you are describing, regarding repeating.  When rag chewing with competent CW ops at 25 to 30 wpm, comfortable CW speeds for a conversation (or chat), people almost never repeat things.  There is no need, you can fill in even when using lots of abbreviations.  You know what the other guy is saying unless it is some technical specification.  You might send your name twice at the beginning, but otherwise missing a letter here or there isn't a big deal to the other station.

It's just for fun, not passing message traffic  :-)  No need to repeat where you were camping last weekend or how many dogs you have..  If he copies 2 or 3, he still gets the point you have more than one and probably isn't worried about it either :-)

Glenn AE0Q
 
Hiya Glenn.

I must admit that I have heard folks repeat some abbreviations, but I get the feeling that it's being done to either try to emphasise  a point they are making, or else it's to give the operator some thinking time! ;D

Things like repeating "R" for received a number of times, or "FB" and so on. So instead of say "R FB OM" it becomes "RRR R FB FB DR OM".

It's not normally the rag-chewers that I've heard doing this, mainly folks who just have a go now and again, or are possibly newish to using CW. I've even done the "R R" thing myself! :-[

Maybe it's something peculiar to particular areas of the world? Or particular groups or clubs maybe?

Our instructor back when I was taking my Radio Amateurs course always used to say (pretty much every week), "Just remember, it's only a hobby..."

73, Mark...
 
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