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"SK" meaning Silent Key is not a Morse prosign, it is an initialism as you might use anywhere else in English. The individual letters "S" and "K" are sent separ
by Stratoscope 8y ago
"SK" meaning Silent Key is not a Morse prosign, it is an initialism as you might use anywhere else in English. The individual letters "S" and "K" are sent separately just like any other word:
••• —•— or di-di-dit (pause) dah-di-dah
There is a prosign <SK> but it has a different meaning - "end of transmission" - and it is sent like this:
•••—•— or di-di-di-dah-di-dah
A prosign is sent as if it were a single letter, without the pauses you would use between letters.
As you might guess, the same prosign could be spelled multiple ways. For example, a prosign named <VA> would be indistinguishable from <SK>, because VA as separate letters would be sent like this:
•••— •— or di-di-di-dah (pause) di-dah
If you take out the pause you have the exact same thing as <SK> above.
Prosigns are customarily typeset with a solid bar over all the letters to indicate they are sent with no pauses as if it were a single letter. When that isn't possible, a prosign may be spelled with angle brackets around it or a similar indication.
This may be a subtle distinction, but in the old days it could save your life. If you ever had to send <SOS> in Morse, trained operators would recognize it faster if you sent it correctly as a prosign:
•••———••• or di-di-di-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit
instead of sending it incorrectly as individual letters:
••• ——— ••• or di-di-dit (pause) dah-dah-dah (pause) di-di-dit
Here is a chart of Morse code characters and prosigns:
https://morsecode.scphillips.com/morse.html https://morsecode.scphillips.com/morse.html
- wrycoder 8y agoAnd the prosign for EOT clearly comes from “key now silent” or “silent key”. What is the end to a life in hamming except “end of transmission”?