Sinking of the RMS Titanic April 1912 when she left Southampton on the first leg of her journey to New York. A few hours later she called at Cherbourg in northern France, a journey of , where she took on passengers. Her next port of call was Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, which she reached around midday on 11 April. She left in the afternoon after taking on more passengers and stores. By the time she departed westwards across the Atlantic she was carrying 892 crew members and 1,320 passengers. This was only about half of her full passenger capacity of 2,435, as it was
CQ (call) the 1912 London International Radiotelegraph Convention, and is still used. A variant of the CQ call, "CQD", was the first code used as a distress signal. It was proposed by the Marconi Company and adopted in 1904, but was replaced between 1906 and 1908 by the SOS code. When the "Titanic" sank in 1912, it initially transmitted the distress call ""CQD DE MGY" (with ""MGY" being the ship's call sign). "Titanic"'s radio operator subsequently alternated between SOS and CQD calls afterwards. In amateur radio usage, a CQ call can be qualified by appending more letters, as in "CQ DX" (meaning