In staccato beeps, they exchanged names and locations. As the signal began to fade, Fairchild signed off. Lloyd kept looking for somebody to talk to, tapping "CQ," or "anybody out there?"

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There sure is.

A proposal last month by the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement for the top class of amateur radio operators to learn Morse code has raised a lot of chatter among local enthusiasts over a 150-year-old technology that supposedly has no future.

And while many say they're disappointed with the FCC's proposal, they also expect that the venerable dits and dahs won't be going anywhere.

"There still will be Morse code, because it still has something to give," Fairchild said.

It may seem hard to understand how, in an age of instant messaging and e-mail and cellphones, anybody would want to use this simple system.

But there's an undeniable mystique to it. Even Hackensack sounds far away and exotic when it's reduced to code.

"We treat it as a foreign language, much as some people might enjoy the ability to speak German, French, Spanish, what have you," said Bill Schwarting of Scotia, a retired teacher who has been an amateur radio enthusiast since 1959.

He and several other local enthusiasts met last week and came up with a consensus: Keep the code requirement.

The American Radio Relay League, the national amateur radio group, opposes the plan, too.

The FCC proposed the switch to keep in step with regulations in other countries, which dropped code requirements years ago. Proponents of the change say that people who want to try the hobby but are put off by learning Morse code might get advanced licenses now. Lower amateur classes have already dropped the requirement.

"Morse code has outlived its usefulness," said Jay Freud, a Clifton Park operator. "I think the United States should go with the rest of the world."

For more than a century, the rest of the world was with Samuel Morse. His telegraph wasn't the first mechanical means of transmitting messages -- that invention belongs to a Frenchman, said William Husson, a communications professor at the University at Albany. Claude Chappe's device wasn't electrical but optical; using movable mechanical arms, operators in towers 10 to 20 miles apart relayed messages down the line.

But the system wasn't good at night, or in bad weather. So the quest to develop an electrical system was on.

But 161 years after the first telegraph line was used, its advocates say Morse's code has use.

For starters, code is quick. Enthusiasts love to point to a demonstration on "The Tonight Show" in May that pitted a pair of Morse code operators against two text-messagers. The telegraphers won.

Its simplicity doesn't require oodles of bandwidth, as many modern communications do. Advocates say that when storms lash the area and electricity is cut, they can still get emergency messages out on low-power transmitters.

"Code can get through when nothing else gets through," said Howard Lester, a retired General Electric engineer. "With the most simple equipment and the very lowest amount of power, the code will get through when the voice will not."

Lester would know: He helped develop a form of digital cellphone service while at GE that's in wide use today.

Others say that well-known shorthand makes it possible for speakers of different languages to converse with each other, and that people with speech impediments find it useful. Many use it for hobby. Fairchild and others use code for contests in which the goal is to make as many far-flung contacts as possible. Code is an efficient way of doing that. And Lester, who goes on his radio every day, said he and his son in Seattle have a weekly appointment to signal each other. "We can get through all the time on code," he said.

There are other, more personal reasons why many enthusiasts want the FCC to mandate code.

Some say code keeps the rabble out. Others want everybody to suffer as they did.

"Personally, I don't like it, because I had to do it the hard way," said Walter Schick, a Schenectady man and 40-year radio operator who left the hobby a year ago. "When I was learning Morse code, I used to go down in the cellar and use the Morse code and practice on it every night for at least an hour or two, and that took me a long time."

While the community is largely resolute that code won't disappear even if the FCC moves ahead with the requirements, there's a wistfulness about the change. One longtime enthusiast, Ray Wemple, said it was "rapidly becoming a lost art."

He sent his message by e-mail.

"You can't stop progress," Fairchild said. "I'm saddened by it. I think it's a wonderful thing to have people to still know that particular aspect of the hobby, but you could tell that the handwriting was on the wall."