From G3PLX:
Bryan:
The story, as I heard it from a Polish old timer, was that during the last
war, in countries occupied by the Hitler regime, it was decreed that
telegraph and radio operators were to sign-off their traffic with skeds with
the signal 'HH' meaning, of course, 'Heil Hitler'.
Some of the operators, possibly with a hint of disrespect to the regime,
corrupted this to '55', that is, by adding an extra dot to each letter. I
suppose this was a way of not being seen to support the regime, or maybe it
was a sort of two-fingered salute.
However, you will see lists of morse abbreviations in which 55 is associated
with the same list of abbreviations from which 73 and 88 are derived, and
the meaning of 55 is stated as 'Good luck' or 'Good fortune'. But the
two-digit abbreviations certainly date from pre-radio (landline) days in the
U.S.A. and I don't think 55 is in any of those old lists, so my guess is
that it had crept into amateur radio from it's war-time usage, and it's 'HH'
origens have been forgotten.
73
Peter
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