AlexPGP's Corner

Well, I'm pretty much where I figured I'd be with this project (except that I had hoped to get a few of the un-OCRed pages past my fingertips before I go to sleep tonight). As it stands, I have 17 pages left, of which none seem very imposing, so I'm not going to worry about it.

In cleaning some papers around the place, I have run into some notes I made a while back underscoring the difference in Russian and US practice when using communications assets such as radio.

One difference is the use, within the US, of a fairly standard phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, etc.), which is used all over the place, or at least in the military, civil aviation, amateur radio, and oh, yes, space flight. Sometimes you'll run across individuals who mix in words from the WWII era (Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, George, etc.), as I sometimes do with "D" because the "D" target on the Marine rifle range was - and likely still is - called the "Dog" target, providing a rough outline of, no, not a canine, but a human torso and head.

The Russians do not appear to have a standard phonetic alphabet, though I have seen a photocopy at JSC of something that purports to be one (mostly names, such as Анна (Anna), Борис (Boris), Владимир (Vladimir), Дмитрий (Dmitriy), etc.), and Russian flight controllers use this alphabet much less often than do their US counterparts. I first ran across "Anna" back during the Mir era, when the ground spent a lot more time sending detailed instructions to the crew by radio.

Another area has to do with reporting of signal strength and readability. As any US ham knows, there are five different gradations of signal strength, each with its own procedure word: "loud," "good," "weak," "very weak," and "not heard." Readability can be "clear," "readable," "distorted," "with interference," and "not readable."

I don't know quite what may be used by the Russians, but in answer to the call "Как нас слышно? ("How do you read us?") I've heard only "хорошо" ("well"), "с помехами" ("with interference"), and "плохо" ("poorly"). This does not permit the descriptive fine-tuning one can achieve with two parameters (which would you rather have, "loud and not readable" or "very weak and clear"?), but it gets the job done.

While I'm on the subject, it annoys me when response "хорошо" is interpreted as "loud and clear," or worse, "five by five" (or <spit>, "five-by").

"Five by five" would appear to mean the same as "loud and clear," but somewhere during my childhood, when I dreamt of becoming a ham (but could not as the mater did not approve), I recall that "five by five" actually meant 50% strength and 50% (good) readability (both scaled from 1 to 10).

Time to hit the sack, methinks. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

Cheers...