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The Phonetic Alphabet
For all those people who may be new to HAM radio and those not so new
- you may recall on Page 81 of the Australian Foundation manual, the reference
to the Phonetic Alphabet along with a clear table describing the Phonetic
represen-tation for each Letter of the Alphabet.
All too often I hear radio hams referring to their call signs using their
own version of the phonetic alphabet, which I and others often find makes
their transmissions confusing to follow. At the age of 5, I had learnt
the current phonetic alphabet and was now being forced to translate what
was being sent.
So.. I decided to look up to see what the history was behind this system
and found a good definition which defined the phonetic alphabet as follows:
"A phonetic alphabet is a list of words used to identify letters
in a message transmitted by radio or telephone. Spoken words from an approved
list are substituted for letters. For example, the word "Navy"
would be "November Alpha Victor Yankee" when spelled in the
phonetic alphabet.
This practice helps to prevent confusion between similar sounding letters,
such as "m" and "n", and to clarify communications
that may be garbled during transmission."
The web site goes on to explain that "the early version of the phonetic
alphabet appeared in the 1913 edition of the Bluejackets' Manual. Found
in the signals section, it was paired with the Alphabetical Code Flags
defined in the International Code. Both the meanings of the flags i.e.
the letter which they represent) and their names (which make up the phonetic
alphabet) were selected by international agreement. Later editions included
the Morse code signal as well."
Looking through the historic table which plots the evolution for each
Phonetic representation, I found it interesting to note how some of the
letters had developed.
For example.
The Letter A (which we represent today as Alpha) started in 1913 as 'Able'
from 1927 it was 'Affirmative,
from 1938 it was 'Affirm'
from World War II it was 'Able'
and then in 1957 it became 'Alpha'.
So the next time you are communicating with another station and you want
to phonetically communicate something in a professional manner, how about
using the 1957 approved list of the phonetic alphabet.
KYLEA VK6FXYL
Source: Wireless
Institute of Australia
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