What does cqd mgy mean

Our Captain reverses ship. We are about 50 miles off. Wants immediate assistance. We have struck an iceberg. Sinking head down. Come soon as possible. What is your position? Our position miles N. Are you steering southerly to meet us? Women and children in boats, can not last much longer. You are much nearer to Titanic. The Titanic is already putting women off in the boats, and he says the weather there is calm and clear. The Olympic is the only ship we have heard say, 'Going to the assistance of the Titanic'.

The others must be a long way from the Titanic. His power may be gone. We are sinking fast. The practical use of wireless telegraphy was made possible by Guglielmo Marconi in the closing years of the 19th century.

Until then, ships at sea out of visual range were very much isolated from shore and other ships. The wireless telegraphers used Morse Code to send messages. By there were many trans-Atlantic British ships equipped with wireless communications. The wireless operators came from the ranks of railroad and postal telegraphers. At the second Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference , the subject of a danger signal was again addressed. Considerable discussion ensued and finally SOS was adopted.

The thinking was that three dots, three dashes and three dots could not be misinterpreted. It was to be sent together as one string. There is no special signification in the letter themselves, and it is entirely incorrect to put full stops between them [the letters]. Stations hearing this distress call were to immediately cease handling traffic until the emergency was over and were likewise bound to answer the distress signal.

Wireless operator T. The U. It is not a signal of three letters, it is a signal of nine bits or peeps, three short, three long, three short. But there is no space of separation between the short and long beeps, making it a very unusual signal, seldom heard and easily missed when first transmitted.

Telegraphy protocol therefore required that it always be sent at least three times in a row. CQD, however, is very easy to pick up. The letters CQ are heard in Morse 24 hours a day over the entire globe, just as true today as it was in There is, unfortunately, a problem.

Young Phillips, Titanic's senior Marconi operator though only 25 years old, as was his second operator Bride broadcast the distress signal in full and correctly. If an operator were to tap out a general call, he or she would tap three times CQ DE followed by the call sign. Before Phillips could send the distress signal, he had to adjust his complicated, bulky and noisy set. Titanic was equipped with the largest Marconi transmitting set available, a five kilowatt set, and several receiving apparati.

For the two operators, Phillips and Bride, there was a small adjacent room with two bunks, one above the other. Their minuscule quarters were situated between the two rooms housing the Marconi equipment, a cabin so inadequate that there was not even room for their personal belongings packed in trunks. On the earlier-commissioned sister-ship Olympic, the wireless rooms were situated on the side of the officers quarters; but that location had proved too noisy, deluged by exterior sounds.

Hence, on Titanic, the rooms were installed in the middle of the officers quarters and were much quieter. At the moment Phillips was told to prepare for transmission of an emergency call, he was transmitting private telegrams from Titanic passengers to Cape Race, Newfoundland.

To send a distress call, he had to change the frequency of his transmitter to kC or, as it was called then, a wave length of meters, or feet. Today, it is still the frequency for Morse distress signals. Transmitters in were more bulky machines than sets with electronic components as we know them today. Phillips had to move handles and levers the size of boots, knobs as large as saucers and adjust boxes with coils that looked like cabinets. An electro motor and generator thundered away. The high tension transformer hummed sharply and, every time the Morse key tapped a dot or dash, rotary sparks cracked brusquely at the end of the generator.

In fact, the room had been heavily insulated with cork to keep noise inside. That Phillips could send the distress call was extremely lucky in the first place.

The transmitter had broken down the night previous and it had taken Phillips and Bride nearly six hours to repair it. The problem had been fairly simple but troublesome to locate. Due to the intense vibration of the electro engine and generator, a high tension lead carrying over 20, volts had rubbed off its insulation against an iron bolt holding the woodwork and a metal frame together.

Once that lead had been inadvertently earthed, no proper spark erupted from the rotary spark unit. The Times reporter had no idea what Bride was talking about and wrote the secondary "the secretary. Bride, however, in his full report to the Marconi Company, explained in detail how he and Phillips had struggled with the transmitter parts and the transformer's secondary. The distress signals that Phillips transmitted were received by numerous ships and by the nearest shore station at Cape Race.