Interesting speed test

[boomergeek]

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

Hey, if you can pick the keyboard, I can pick the keyer. I go for an iambic, thanks. I stick with the 75 WPM statement, too.

Looking at the chart for QWERTY: Have you ever met anyone who could type 150 WPM on anything? I wonder what the world speed record is. As you well know, 75 WPM is rare. Ask around where you work.

And, as others have stated: When you read, you decode the information a word at a time, not a single letter at a time. We're apples to apples here.


Don

PS: The "other life" Al S. refers to is that I write about digital communications for a ham radio magazine. That's why Shannon is a hero of mine, and why I know a little about coding theory and modulation types. Anthony, let me know if you have any questions.

I do recognize that CW rises to almost a form of natural language to the very proficient user, but my hunch is that it is not as fast or efficient and requires more concentration than: 1) talking and listening; or 2) typing text and reading text.

The idea of the Leno test was to demonstrate that: "CW and old guys rule!"

While these two things may be true, competing against a known-to-be-slow multi-tap cellphone is a copout.

The demonstration had the CW going at under 30 wpm because that was as fast as the receiving CWer could write legibly.
http://www.marc.on.ca/marc/hamradio/hr_cw_vs_sms.asp

Here is a blackberry going at 75 wpm: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egie4ApwoUg&fmt=18

But since you want to choose your keyer, then I would like to choose my own keyboard and person, I would probably pick a bluetooth DVORAK keyboard, any bluetooth enabled cellphone and someone like Barbara Blackburn and make it a reasonable length message:
Mrs. Barbara Blackburn of Salem, Oregon maintained a speed of 150 wpm for 50 min (37,500 key strokes) and attained a speed of 170 wpm using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (DSK) system. Her top speed was recorded at 212 wpm. Source: Norris McWhirter, ed. (1985), THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS, 23rd US edition, New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

But if you really want speed in person to person message communication, how about 637 wpm?
http://members.fortunecity.com/talker2/talk.htm
Steve Woodmore can speak at 637 words per minute, which is 10.25 words per second.

The common practical purpose of sending a text message is send and forget, and not to require a person at the other end to spend immediate time and mental energy decoding it at the other end: I think it is generally accepted that most sighted people can read text much faster than they can learn to decode CW.

I do not expect to see a resurgence of people going to the telegram office or their local ham to send messages rather than just pulling out their cellphone. But I could be wrong.

I think it is generally accepted that the need for CW still exists but is waning a bit. How else would you explain the removal of CW testing for most if not all US licenses? The cynic in me would guess that the radio retailers want to sell more radios to people that are too lazy to learn some proficiency in the CW language and the retailers lobbied the FCC. The Elmers who would generally like to see CW proficiency remain a requirement lost out to the retailers.

Part of it could also be for the same reason teachers in more advanced math classes let students use calculators: because using machines instead of your brain to do more basic tasks frees the mind to concentrate on other things. Do you use a calculator or would you force yourself to compute long series of mathematical operations in your head?