The other day, I have listened to a radio program where an ENT doctor was talking about sensory hearing loss. He said, in that condition, the patient could not hear but also understand what others talked to him/her. Not only the inner ear and auditory nerve but also higher brain center responsible for understanding are often disturbed.
For such a patient, we should not speak slowly but should emphasize each word with sufficient spaces between them, as the doctor said. That wider spaces are of much more help to the handicapped people. This means simply that we are not listening each character but meaning of each words which eventually leads us to the whole meaning of a sentence.
I believe it is also the case with CW reception. We are taking what the sendes says by taking meaning of each words, of course, not by each character or whole sentence. Longer the spaces between words are, easier we could take its meaning, that is, what the sender says. This space between words is determined in the relation with the space between characters. If the latter is too long, it is often difficult to take each word as it is. The latter should be as short as possible while the former should be long. It helps us to read sentences sent with CW.
Aesthetically, such code sending sounds more favorable as well as more beautiful than equally spaced codes. I could remember an example of beautiful code sender. It is Rod K5BGB. It was a pleasure for me to listen to him making pretty good spces between words with rather short ones between characters. It was a functionally as well as aesthetically excellent code sending. Unfortunately, such an operator is rarely heard nowadays.
I believe your analysis to be precise. In my efforts to continue to improve my copy skills, I find the easiest cw to copy is that which is sent with the words being concisely sent. But, the break between the words is sufficient that there is no mistake that there is a new word starting. That procedure allows my brain to capture the "word" and digest it as a word. The hardest copy for me is the "run on sentence" where the words are just one continuous string of characters. Since I suffer from the same malady, I believe that senders sense that to accomplish increased sending speed, they need to "hurry" the sending. That results in a continuous string of characters, without a beginning and an end. Tonight, I found myself sending that way. I switched to a slower bug and my sending improved greatly. I owe this knowledge to advise I received some time back from the owner of this blog.
ReplyDeleteDon,
DeleteI agree with you 100%. For a non native of English, this is very important. Because we should consiously translate the message. Native speakers could go through it without being aware of the translation process.
Anyway, we are originally handicapped with code copying process. Concise code sending is really needed for those handicapped.
Shin
Indeed. A very keen observation. I too find that code sent with a nice pause between words makes copying faster speed CW not only easier but more pleasureable - less rushed. Much the same as listening to someone speaking too fast, the speech becomes unpleasant and I quickly stop listening.
ReplyDeletecheers, Graham ve3gtc
Graham,
DeleteThanks for the comment. I am happy to have someone feeling the same way. The senders are, however, often not aware of or not caring for this principle. We should be careful to send each word concisely.
See you on the radio.
Shin