Usually, telegrams are divided into three levels: special, urgent and urgent, and there are corresponding time regulations. The weather forecast is broadcast to the airport on time every hour. Generally speaking, visibility, wind direction, wind speed, clouds and thunderstorms. , with 5 numbers as a group, a total of 6 to 7 groups. The purpose is to inform the weather changes at any time and provide meteorological support for night flight. When sending and receiving telegrams, we must absolutely guarantee the validity of the contents and the accuracy of 100%. Once there are delays and errors, it will directly affect the safety of the aircraft and the military operations of the troops, and the consequences will be unimaginable.
After our new training, all the staff packed their backpacks, brought all their personal furniture and gathered in the big playground. Arms dealers of various companies are waiting for American recruits (commonly known as troops) to be assigned soon. At that time, I felt a sense of loss and sourness when I saw our comrades who had been living and training together for three months being taken away by name. And most of us are left behind to study news.
There are not many things that the operator really needs to remember, only the number of 18 and the code of 26 letters, and some commonly used "notification languages" (contact languages) composed of letters, but the speed and accuracy of copying and sending messages are very high.
A few days before the official start of training, I have easily memorized everything I need to recite. However, we have to admit that people's intelligence and reaction degree are really different.
Our classroom should be the earliest "audio-visual" classroom. Each student has a fixed key and a pair of headphones on his desk. Keys and headphones are connected to the platform. Teachers can monitor any student's report at will. Students can also listen to the teacher's report through headphones alone. It is like a cable radio station, with all departments connected.
Telegraph training courses include sending and copying newspapers. The training of newspaper copying is divided into letter newspaper copying and number newspaper copying. Letter copying is mainly used to contact the codes and communication languages of both parties. Digital newspaper copy is to copy Arabic numerals, not telegraph information. The faster the newspaper is copied, the higher the accuracy, and the higher the technical level. The same is true for delivering newspapers.
No one expected that the formal training actually started from the pen-holding posture. The writing of numbers and letters should also be learned from the beginning, and must be written word by word in a unified copying font. These trainings are mainly to improve the speed of copying newspapers by operators and make the copied fonts easier to identify. When the operators write 2 and 3, they are obviously different from ordinary people. However, this writing habit is not easy to maintain. After leaving the newspaper for a few years, I returned to my normal writing style.
After the telegraph training began, we gradually realized that it was not easy to be a telegraph operator. According to the introduction of the older generation of telephone operators, early telephone operators used "standing posture" to deliver newspapers. The so-called "standing posture" means that when the time is announced, the middle finger of the right hand stands on the button of the electric key and taps. In our generation, the posture of sending messages has changed from "standing posture" to "kneeling posture". When sending information, the middle finger is no longer "standing" on the key, but "kneeling" on the key. In this way, the tender meat under the middle finger nail becomes the main hitting point when hitting the electric key. For the operator who just started training, the spring of the electric key is adjusted hard. So not long after the telegraph training began, almost all the students' right middle finger nails were swollen. Some people even have broken fingers, bloody and horrible, and the pain can be imagined. In the "hit" password shouted by the teacher, everyone basically gritted their teeth and knocked down the key ... Even so, the training never stopped. Until one day, everyone gave birth to a thick calluses under the middle finger, and finally passed this level.
Training is boring most of the time, and it just cycles between copying and delivering newspapers every day. However, with the passage of time, the speed of students sending and copying newspapers is constantly improving. From the beginning, I didn't understand, to copying 10, 20, 30 yards ... 80 yards per minute, and finally copying 120 yards per minute, continuously copying more than 1200 digits. ...
The main task of telegraph training is to teach recruits to send and receive telegrams and reach a certain level. The training is divided into two parts, one is the training of copying and receiving telegrams; The other part is telegraph training.
The training of newspaper copying is to reduce the Morse code sent by the other party to 10 Arabic letters or 26 English letters. Where 10 Arabic letters are distinguished by long and short codes, and the short code 1 is: one is short and the other is long, that is, "drip, drip, drip"; The long code of 1 is one short and four long, that is, "drip, drip, drip, drip, drip". The training team will spend most of their time in the training of copying and receiving telegrams. There is a simple reason. Copying and receiving telegrams is to make the brain form a conditioned reflex to the sound of the code through a lot of repeated practice. After a certain period of training, as long as the ear hears the sound of the code, the brain does not need to distinguish whether the code is "tick-tock" or "tick-tock" at all, and immediately writes the correct letters on the paper. The training of copying newspapers is very boring. We wear headphones and hold pencils for 8 hours every day, constantly listening to the sound of telegrams and copying on paper, and our brains are in a state of high tension for a long time. Sometimes the teacher will add some interference noise to the telegram to imitate the actual newspaper receiving environment.
Although everyone is training hard, not everyone can finally reach the level of copying high-speed code. Because once the speed of telegrams is higher than 120 per second, it is necessary to rely on the technology of "coding" to realize unified writing in order to copy telegrams completely and correctly. The so-called "code pressing" means that when the other party sends the first letter, the copywriter doesn't rush to write, but keeps the code he hears in mind, and when the other party sends the second letter, he begins to write the first letter on paper. It is said that a master of "pressing the code" can press four letters at most, which means that the newspaper copywriter will take the time to copy the last set of letters on the paper after the other party's telegram stops. "Coding" technology is a special talent. Only people with this special talent can copy high-speed telegrams as high as 160 per second. Although I am smart and studious, I don't have the talent of "pressing the code", so the highest speed of reading and receiving telegrams in the training team is only 140 per minute.
It is more difficult and more difficult to send training.
First, you have to pass the key. There are two ways to send information: kneeling is to kneel the first knuckle of the middle finger on the disk of the electric key grip, the index finger bends naturally, the fingertip points to the round head of the grip, and the thumb gently holds the round head of the electric key grip. The standing posture is that the index finger and thumb are side by side, and the two fingertips are on the handle of the electric key. Whether you are kneeling or standing, you should use your middle finger to drive your wrist to press the electric key, so that the electric contact above the electric key will contact the electric contact below the electric key for a short time, so that a "drop" will appear. The standard length of "click" is three drops. If the wrist is used to control the contact time of the electric key contact, a "click" sound will be formed. It is through this gesture that the sender sends Morse code into space through radio equipment.
In order to finally achieve high-speed newspaper delivery, newspaper delivery training must follow scientific laws and step by step, so beginners all use kneeling posture to deliver newspapers. Moreover, in order to exercise your wrist strength, when you start to learn to send telegrams, you should tighten the spring of the telegraph structure, increase the distance between the keys, and send them slowly bit by bit. When the teacher feels that this level is relatively stable, students can gradually loosen the spring, reduce the distance between the contacts, and correspondingly improve the newspaper delivery speed. Because the first knuckle of the middle finger is kneeling on the keyboard, it didn't take long for the nail root of the middle finger to be pressed by the top of the keyboard, and then it became red and swollen. Some students even chafed their skin and couldn't touch the keys at all the next day. But the training can't stop, and everyone can only endure to grind cocoons with their fingers and get used to the electric keys. By the way, the identity of the operator is the easiest to identify, because the first knuckle of their middle finger has been kneeling on the key for a long time, and the nails of the middle finger are generally sunken, so was I at the beginning.
Secondly, through the transition from wrist force to finger force. You know, it's relatively easy to send a telegram at a low speed. Generally speaking, after more than a month of training, you can send a message at a low speed through rhythmic movement of your wrist. But it is impossible to send high-speed telegrams above 120 per minute by wrist force. Think about it, there are 120 words every minute, and each word has an average of 3 drops and 1.5 clicks. Coupled with the gap in bytes, the wrist must move up and down at least five times per second, and high-speed transmission cannot be achieved by the wrist alone. Therefore, only through the long-term tempering of the sender, in a very natural way, the wrist strength exceeds the finger strength, and through the joint movement of the wrist and the finger, the telegram can be sent at a very high speed. Because everyone's wrist and finger jitter is different when sending a telegram, an experienced receiver can often judge who sent the telegram according to the sender's gesture. Also, because the strength of the wrist determines the speed and quality of newspaper delivery, army chiefs, companies and operators themselves cherish the wrist of the operators and generally try to avoid taking part in heavy manual labor, thus highlighting the political era. Some people criticize the army for training operators into revisionist seedlings who can't carry their shoulders and hands