[CQ-Contest] Prosign for Please Copy

[Hans Brakob]

Even the Justices on the Supreme Court get to publish a dissenting opinion, so here is mine.  Don’t unfriend me.



I notice a fair amount of “attitude” about the prelude “Please copy” which was commonly heard this past weekend during Phone Sweepstakes.



That practice comes from good historical stock, and I have a fondness for it.



The Sweepstakes contest has it’s roots in the traffic handlers of the American Radio Relay League (remember that club).  It was designed for traffic handlers to test their skill at actually exchanging some information (not just running the “FiE NIGH FOE” tape loop).



As you might expect (given the traffic handler roots)  the contest exchange resembles the heading of a standard message being sent for relay.



So phone message handlers preambled their traffic with “Please copy my message #1, Precedence Alpha, from K0HB, Check 17 (groups), Origin Minnesota”



So there you have “the rest of the story”.



Copy?



73, de Hans, K0HB



PS:  As an unrelated “aside”, in my Navy days voice communications were almost exclusively used for real-time tactical and maneuvering communications, as in “On my mark right corpen speed 25 <pause> MARK”.  On the other hand, if you wanted to send a piece of formal record traffic by voice, you prefaced your transmission with “COPY”, which meant “write this down”.


73, de Hans, KØHB
“Just a Boy and his Radio”™
________________________________
From: CQ-Contest <cq-contest-bounces+kzerohb=gmail.com at contesting.com> on behalf of Jim Brown <k9yc at audiosystemsgroup.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 1:55:46 PM
To: cq-contest at contesting.com <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Prosign for Please Copy

On 11/24/2020 9:37 AM, Ward Silver wrote:
> As far as I can tell, "5NN" is the prosign for "please copy"

When someone starts with "Please Copy" I delete the QSO and tell the op
that I don't work stations who say "please copy."

To those who say I'm being hard on them, I respond that someone has to
teach them that it's bad procedure. From my days long ago in the civil
rights movement, I learned that if you're not part of the solution,
you're part of the problem.

73, Jim K9YC
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