The NATO Phonetic Alphabet is a spelling alphabet used by airline pilots, police, the military, and other officials when communicating over radio or telephone. The purpose of the phonetic alphabet is to ensure that letters are clearly understood. It is used to solve the problem when P’s sounded like B’s, S’s sounded like X’s, and so on. To prevent confusion in situations like this, people are often trained to use a spelling alphabet to make them better understood over the phone when they have to read off a series of letters.

Have at look at the list below and see if you can spell out your full name.

You can practice your alphabet by playing the “Lexicon Lander” game here -> http://alturl.com/64wnf

Echo November Juliet Oscar Yankee!!

Semaphore flags is the system used for communicating information at a distance by using visual signals with hand-held flags. Semaphore flags are usually red and yellow for signalling between ships at sea and blue and white for signalling to and from land

When you see the “Numerical” flag it means that everything after is a number. When the letter J (Alphabetic) flag is shown in the number, it means that the number is finished and the next sequence is alphabetic.

We will be using semaphores in next Thursdays meeting so have a look at the picture below to practice.

See if you can work out the mysterious cryptic message at the bottom of this post

Bonus points for the first scout to answer the question below :

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