Military radio lingo code#
He was given the task of coming up with a unique and easily understandable emergency code word. It was originated in 1923 by Frederick Stanley Mockford, a senior radio officer at London's Croydon Airport. Mayday is an international code word used to signal life-threatening emergencies. In the days of the telegraph, the Morse code letter R (dot-dash-dot) was sometimes used to indicate "received" or "message received/understood." When radio voice communication began to replace telegraphs, Roger, the code word assigned to the letter R in the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet (the radio alphabet used by all branches of the United States military from 1941 to 1956), took on the same role.Ĭontrary to what Hollywood would have you think, Roger only means "last transmission received/understood" and does not also mean or imply "I will comply." Wilco ( Will Comply) is the code used if the speaker intends to convey "message received and will comply." Given that, the phrase Roger Wilco, which you so often hear in the movies, is redundant and not really used since Wilco alone covers all the bases and acknowledges receipt of message and states intent to comply. After several instances of inter-agency communication problems, the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) discouraged the use of ten-codes and today the federal government recommends they be replaced with plain, everyday language. The problem came to a head in 2005 during rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina. Over time, differing meanings for the codes came about in different agencies and jurisdictions, undoing the codes' usefulness as a concise and standardized system. The codes were expanded by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International (APCO) in 1974 and were used by both law enforcement agencies and civilian CB radio users. The codes also allowed for brevity and standardization in radio message traffic. Preceding every code with "ten" gave the sometimes slow equipment time to warm up and improved the likelihood that a listener would understand the important part of a message. Charles Hopper, a communications director with the Illinois State Police, developed them in 1937 to combat the problem of the first syllables or words of a transmission being cut off or misunderstood. The ten-codes or ten-signals are code words used as stand-ins for common phrases in radio communication. wrote in wondering why we say things like "10-4" and "Roger" on walkie-talkies and other two-way radios.
Reader and frequent question-asker Nate J.
0 kommentar(er)
