You may have noticed a new sticker we are offering with "MGY" on it. What does that mean and what does it have to do with the TITANIC?? The ship had two Marconi wireless operators (Radio Officers): John Phillips and Harold Bride. They were employed by Marconi and not the White Star Line. Marconi assigned radio callsigns to their radio stations (either on land or at sea) and initally gave TITANIC "MUC". This was later changed to "MGY". Radio callsigns were shorthand for the name of the ship. Since back then messages were sent via Morse Code, typing out a three letter code (now four letters) was a lot easier and quicker than "TITANIC" or "EMPRESS OF IRELAND". Most of Marconi's call signs began with "M" but this was later changed (after TITANIC) to give each nation a series of letters to identify the country of origin. The UK retained "G" and "M". The US gave "N" to naval, Coast Guard, or public vessels and "K" and "W" to merchant ships.
TITANIC sent out its distress message as: "CQD DE MGY". "CQD" was a distress signal to all vessels, "DE" means "this is" (still in use today in radio communications), and "MGY" identified the station as TITANIC. In Morse Code, it would have sounded like this: -- - -- - / -- -- - -- / -- - - // -- - - / - // -- -- / -- -- - / -- - -- -- For more information concerning TITANIC's radio operations, this is a great website! It really goes into great detail and is an interesting read.
1 Comment
Robert Bassolino
5/2/2012 12:02:52 pm
Great information and well presented.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI maintain this discussion about flag related topics. Follow us and learn something new today! Feel free to post comments as well. Archives
November 2012
Categories
All
|