• Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      A radio show I listened to years ago did a competition each day to update each letter of the phonetic alphabet. I don’t remember most of them, but they decided that T should be “Technotechnotechno” and that always amused me.

    • RattlerSix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 days ago

      I always thought we should add the Hot Shots! callsigns

      “Copy that, Purple Fluffer Nutter.”

      “Roger that, Milli Vanilli Chilly Willy.”

    • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      The “calls with your mom or diffusing a bomb”…that whole section seems weird.

        • rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          S1, E7: Skytanic

          It’s the first episode with Ray I think. Check it out on Netflix or wherever you dig up your internet video booty arr

      • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Haha, didn’t catch that it was “diffusing” you know I guess a pretty efficient way to do that would be to detonate it.

  • ptc075@lemmy.zipEnglish
    171·
    5 days ago

    I’ve always enjoyed playing with folks who actually know this by giving them intentionally misleading cues. Instead of “E as in Echo”, say “G as in Gecko”. That sort of thing. Cuneiform, Frisky, Mango, Oubliette, Zima…

  • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    There was a very large number of people who seem to want to write C for Sierra and it’s really concerning.

    Not only does it mean they’ve never heard of Sierra Leone which shows a distinct lack of geopolitical knowledge, but they’ve also never heard of Sierra software which shows that they’re not worth talking to.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Also that they thought that the phonetic alphabet, created for making it less ambiguous to describe English letters verbally, would decide to use one of the exception cases to the pronunciation of the letter C where it takes on the identical sound to the letter S, to help avoid confusion.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        I’m sure a lot of people don’t know about the phonetic alphabet and just think I’m coming up with equivalents on the fly.

        I once had an engineer go “G as in, …er… Oh Geee?”, which I suppose worked, sort of.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    242·
    6 days ago

    For something so commonly used, it’s got some pretty glaring flaws. Most critically, ‘golf’ and ‘mike’ - single syllable, which over radio comms often doesn’t sound like shit. Compare to something like ‘oscar’, which even if either half of it gets all staticky you still hear “osc–” or “–car” which is enough to still receive an accurate exchange of info.

    My more whiny complaints are that the number of syllables are inconsistent, F and X use compound words instead of one single complete word which feels… icky… x gets a pass cuz x is always janky and x-ray is perfect. Some of the entries rhyme with commonly used words that could confuse someone who’s either inexperienced or in a stressful situation like being shot at. For example, “echo” could be misheard as “gecko” and even though “gecko” isn’t on the list, our brains do stupid shit when they’re saturated with adrenaline, so something like this should be as absolutely idiot-proof as possible.

    If I could magic that fucker into something new, I’d shoot for:

    • every entry is exactly three syllables.

    • no two of the same syllables in any entry can rhyme with those two syllables of another entry. I.E., “Uniform” and “Chloroform” are not compatible because syllables 2 and 3 are too similar.

    • Each entry should be as common a word as possible, in as low/unspecialized a reading level as possible. I.E., “November” is recognizable by nearly everyone; vs something like “Ganglia” which is gibberish to anyone without specialty knowledge requiring them to be familiar with ganglia.

    • No compound or multiple word entries.

    • X gets a pass cuz x is always janky and x-ray is perfect.

    • Prototype phonetic alphabet must be first scrutinized by a panel consisting of a linguist, a speech pathologist, an English teacher, a 7 year old, a highschooler, a geriatric with severe hearing loss, and a junior enlisted US Marine. Their job is to find any potential for confusion.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      6 days ago

      But with your new rules, x can be xylophone so you don’t need the special case rule for x anymore.

    • 667@lemmy.radioEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      In Amateur Radio, if our first calls are not received correctly, most experienced operators will switch up and use alternates for troublesome phonetics. America for Alpha, Germany for Golf, Kilowatt for Kilo. Some folks even use amusing ones. I once heard an American station using “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for their callsign ending in KFC.

  • Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    6 days ago

    I remember someone screaming for a code down a phone line once and my mate started with the whole “G for gnome” , “P for pterodactyl” etc.

    I laughed.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
    19·
    6 days ago

    it seems hard unless you use it a lot and then it’s second nature. I’ve had to actually stop myself from using it in places like for a drive-thru pickup code, as that never goes well.

    • harsh3466@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      6 days ago

      I was using this to read put a gift card code to make a purchase over the phone with apple (don’t ask why, it was a shit show), and when I gave Sierra, the person thought it was C as in Ciara. Had to repeat the whole thing over again.

  • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    14·
    6 days ago

    one of my last jobs needed me to use this for reading inventory locations to a crane operator over a phone. he always seemed slightly bemused that I didn’t know the phonetic alphabet and had to make up my own phonetics for him

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      I can imagine the laughs at all the words you might have come up with. “It’s at uhh… Narwhal Sellotape Banana!”

      A reminder though, to anyone who needs it - don’t be condescending to others for not knowing things. Everything we know, we had to learn.

      For me, I learnt the phonetic alphabet after getting frustrated one too many times trying to give my postal code and car reg on a bad phone line.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    14·
    6 days ago

    As a Swedish IT technician, I use two phonetic alphabets.

    The Swedish phonetic alphabet was created in the 1890s and first published in 1902, in the 1960s a few entries were changed to reduce the risk of confusion.

    A - Adam
    B - Bertil
    C - Cesar
    D - David
    E - Erik
    F - Filip
    G - Gustav
    H - Helge
    I - Ivar
    J - Johan
    K - Kalle
    L - Ludvig
    M - Martin
    N - Niklas
    O - Olle (air traffic communications), Olof (military use)
    P - Petter
    Q - Qvintus
    R - Rudolf
    S - Sigurd
    T - Tore
    U - Urban
    V - Viktor
    W - Wilhelm
    X - Xerxes
    Y - Yngve
    Z - Zäta
    Å - Åke
    Ä - Ärlig
    Ö - Östen

  • Arrkk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    6 days ago

    Always been a bit annoyed that people describe Morse as a binary code, it isn’t, it’s technically trinary, you have 3 symbols, dot, dash, and space. Without a space you can’t discern the difference between “hi” and “eeeeee”.

    • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
      61·
      5 days ago

      I dunno that’s kind of like saying computer binary is trinary because there is a distinct separation of the bits

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
      51·
      5 days ago

      There is more than one width of space as well. And indeed, there are sometimes tones longer than a dash used as control codes.

      But it’s a binary signal. It’s either on or off. All the symbols are described using a binary signal. There is a regular clock that divides the signal and each interval of the signal is read as on or off. A dah is three dits wide, most spaces are one or three dits wide, etc.

      • Arrkk@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Morse code is transmitted as a binary code, but that doesn’t make Morse code binary. If that were the case the Latin alphabet would also count as binary because computers transmit it in binary. The rules you describe is the encoding between Morse code’s native trinary alphanumeric encoding into a binary format for transmission.

    • √𝛂𝛋𝛆@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      It is about like the difference between SPI and I2C serial communications.

      I struggled with that one for a little while. My intuition of serial is more like SPI where there is a dedicated clock structure from a clock source that is separate from the data transmission. Or like with UART serial where the clock baud rate must be known or set in advance to establish communications.

      However, with I2C serial it is only a 2 wire data interface, and the clock is built into the data. That is the main serial communications method used for most analog-world type sensors, like temperature, pressure, real time clocks chips, and many slow types of EEPROM persistent memory. SPI is used for small simple displays in embedded devices, and stuff like the flash memory chip that stores your bootloader on your computer. UART is most often the remote serial terminal access on stuff like your computer and router, though all of these com peripherals have exceptions in use cases.

      The way I2C works is that the data line is always held in a high state with a weak pull up resistor. The devices attached to this data line use NPN transistors to pull the line low. Then the protocol establishes who gets to talk and when and how.