When I took flying lessons the high tech radio in the airplane (the
only high tech thing on that old piece of junk) was a Narco SuperHomer
(if you ain't old enough to know what that is, turn the page)
Anyway, as we got into the XC portion of training the instructor would
tell me to fly to the xxx VOR.. I would consult the chart, dial up the
appropriate frequency, turn up the audio and listen to the CW id...
"Have you got it?", he would shout (we didn't know enough to use
headsets in those days)
"Yup."...
"How do you know?"
"It's sending xxx." I would reply...
He would glare at me and hollar, "Bull ****, you didn't copy it down."
Then he would laboriously use an old, well chewed, yellow pencil to
mark the dots and dashes on a scrap of paper... Then fight with the
chart to get it unfolded to the flap where the Morse Code was printed
out next to the letters of the alphabet... Sure enough it would turn
out to be xxx... He would glare at me and pout... Then give me the
lecture that if I didn't learn to do it right I was going to fail my
check ride... He must have done that 20 times during my training and
no amount of explaining that I could hear the morse code letters just
like he was tallking to me, satisified him... He never believed me,
"you're just lucky you tuned in the right vor but someday it's going to
bite you.", he would growl...
Gawd rest his grumpy soul... He was flying food to starving refugees in
Africa when rebels used a heat seeking missile to blow the wing off his
DC6... The fathers of the very same sonsabitches that are raping and
murdering over there right now...

denny / k8do