Morse commercial radio stations still alive

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Article of OM Louis SZONDY – VK5EEE

Some information about one of the nations still using CW: South Korea.

The most technically advanced nations in Asia, and also the 4 economic giants, all use CW: South Korea, Japan, PR China, India. Pakistan and Indonesia also use CW for non-amateur services.

In this article I will focus on South Korea but first a short mention of the others.

Japan has a station which was mentioned in TrafficList.Net and is owned by a fishing fleet company, for communication with its fleet in the Pacific. I have heard this Coastal Station exchanging telegrams in Japanese Morse with Japanese ships on 17 or 22 MHz.

India and Pakistan navies use CW, though it seems more as a reserve. China uses CW for weather reports to ships in Chinese CW, noted by its 4 digit numeric characters that are sent with cut-number CW to make it quicker.

Indonesia uses CW for it’s National Resilience Institute and Navy and broadcasts several long messages each day in Bahasa language in plain text.

Thanks to OM Lee DS1QGG, for the below photographs, and I will now give you the schedules for South Korea Coastal station. Note that each frequency has a different callsign and is beaming in different directions to cover various parts of the ocean. Korean ships wishing to call back home will call on a calling frequency which is split, and is generally a few hundred kHz lower in frequency in the international ships maritime calling frequency bands.

Woo Hwa Lee

OM Woo Hwa Lee

The operators at HLG etc leave the automatic CQ loop running so that ships can listen to each frequency and choose the one with the strongest signal before calling. If a Coastal radio operator hears the ship they stop the loop and will respond to the ship which will change its frequency to a “working frequency” and exchange telegrams in Korean CW with the coastal station.

A few times a day some of the Coastal Station frequencies will broadcast a “Traffic List” which is a list in alpha-numeric order of each ship’s callsign that there is a telegram waiting for. For example at 1400Z on HLG 8484 and also at 0800Z. Perhaps these Traffic Lists are every 6 hours, I’m not sure. If so  they will be at 0200Z, 0800Z, 1400Z and 2000Z.

The tuning signal CQ looks like this:

CQ CQ CQ DE HLO HLO HLO QSX 12MHZ K

Calling all ships this is HLO, I am listening (on the) 12MHz (ships calling frequency band) go ahead.

HLG 8484kHz (09-24Z)
HLW 8636kHz (09-24Z)
HLO 12843kHz (H24)
HLF 12916.5kHz (H24)
HLW2 12923kHz (H24)
HLG 12935kHz (H24)
HLJ 16910kHz (00-09Z)
HLO 16990kHz (00-09Z)
HLW 17130kHz (00-09Z)
HLF 22611.5kHz (00-09Z)

These stations provide good practice for those learning CW. The CQ loops are at a speed of about 20WPM: Via www.lcwo.net text-to-cw I made this file which is an exact identical copy of HLO and indeed it is 20WPM:                      http://cgi3.lcwo.net/cgi-bin/cw.mp3?s=20&e=50&f=700&t=CQ%20CQ%20CQ%20DE%20HLO%20HLO%20HLO%20QSX%2012MHZ%20K%20%20%20%20^

See attached photos thanks to Lee DS1QGG. If anyone has a valid email for him please let me know as his usual email has been unavailable for some time.

—
— Appeal: maintaining the VKCW.NET site and furthering the interests of CW in Australia has been an expensive exercise for me in terms of time and loss of earnings, but worth it.
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73 es 77 de VK5EEE
Lou.