Gee, thanks Teddy... but I hate to burst you bubble, along with your journo friend's, Mr. Quinn's, but I still use a Morse clacker to signal my kids home from the pool down at the boat yard in the Hamptons. I have a ground-return alarm circuit tied into a family owned business out on the Island that is so provisioned, in case the class 5 switch in the Riverhead Office goes down.
The alarm circuit is good for d.c. sinaling, and it terminates in an ascii decode device. From the registers in the decode device my messages are translated from morse into text, which in turn is read by a voice synthesizer and sent over a loudspeaker. Only problem is I can't give the two finger whistle over it. Other than that, it does the trick, and only costs me $19 per month to lease from BEL. I use if for other things, but that's for another post.
When I'm done using it sometime in the future (when I get my VoIP rig in place, when I figure out how to support IP over the LILCO power line distribution to the yard) I'll be sure to notify the journo Quinn. But until then, he's not earning his keep as far as I'm concerned.
By the way, about ten years ago there was a similar story in Telephony Mag about the last Magneto to be retired in some town in Maine. Uh uh. I got one, and it still works on my intercom system in Brooklyn.
73s, OM .-.-.
(Pardon me. That's "Best regards and see you later, Old Man, over and out" in Ham Talk)
Frank Coluccio |
