Morse code has some interesting properties that make it an ideal way to communicate when all else fails:
1. It can be transmitted by simple means through many mediums - radio waves (amateur radio, as in the article), light (turning a light on and off), sound (I once used a boat horn to communicate with another boat)... technically I could even tap it on someone's shoulder.
2. It's self-clocking; you don't need a way to synchronize between two operators. One of the amateur radio clubs within range of me, K1USN (https://www.k1usn.com/sst) runs a contest that's limited to 20wpm so that new operators can get used to interpreting Morse on the fly.
3. It's fairly easy to recover after a fault - much easier than, say, ASCII. I might lose a few characters, but much like a smudge on a written page, I can figure out where intelligible letters start again without much difficulty.
HAM was a nice rabbit hole to fall into, but unfortunately I couldn't muster enough interest to actually get good enough to go "on air".
Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:
Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.
On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word".
(Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)
One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)
People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.
One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)
> Learning Morse code is like learning a new language.
It is not. Cat is still spelled cat.
I passed my 20 wpm morse code license 30+ years ago, and when I hear code to this day, it sounds just as natural as someone spelling cat as "See Aye Tee".
Morse code is not a new language, but it is a new way of writing, which is almost the same as a new language in many ways.
You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?
I just spent the past five years learning Morse code, and for me it was significantly more difficult than learning a foreign language. Perhaps I'm just getting old and my brain isn't as pliable as it used to be, but it's been a very long and difficult journey. Here is what I've learned:
- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM.
- To go beyond 20WPM you have to hand-off the processing to the subconscious mind. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to build the mental muscle memory to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps. It literally took years of daily practice to get there.
- Once you've mastered the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. And at some point, you start to hear entire words, not letters.
- If I attempt to perceive individual letters at higher speeds I almost always end up missing the rest of the word. At these speeds, the conscious, logical brain becomes a liability that must be to be surpressed to decode effectively. As a 30 year software developer, this has been VERY difficult to do.
- When I get into the flow, I don't "think" about the letters or "hear" a series of beeps. The words somehow just magically pop into my mind.
- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM.
- To go beyond 20WPM you have to tap into subconscious pattern recognition, which requires engaging the subconscious mind to do the processing. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to train the brain to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps.
- Once you've learned the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. Eventually you start to hear words, not letters. In fact, if I try to pick out individual letters at higher speeds I end up missing the rest of the word.
I don't remember this much pain, but I was about 10 years old when I learned. On the other hand I've been learning guitar late in life and am wondering how much easier that would be if my brain had seen a few less orbits.
That isn’t what the person to whom you’re responding is saying.
Morse code is very much like a language in that there are audible intonations that differentiate between See, Aye and Tee. Being able to copy that in your head is the same as listening to English and not needing to reach for the dictionary every other word.
I learned Morse code almost 50 years ago. I distinctly remember how learning progressed through stages
- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A
- hear di-dah, think "A"
- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"
- add more and more words
Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word
> use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission
I think the most common metaphor I've encountered is to penmanship. Like handwriting, Morse can be: sloppy or choppy, utilitarian or calligraphic, disjointed or well-joined, beautiful or ugly, legible or illegible, rough or smooth, languid or rushed, cramped or too spread out.
I've told my family that if I'm ever in a hospital bed due and seemingly unresponsive due to injury or illness, to check whether I'm not trying to communicate (using eye movements, finger twitches, or whatever) in morse code.
Not sure if you're familiar with this or not, but that concept appears as part of the story in the novel[1] and movie[2] "Johnny Got His Gun". The premise is based on a badly injured soldier during WWI who has lost his ability to speak, see, hear, etc. He communicates by banging his head on his pillow in Morse Code. Many scenes from that movie are interspersed throughout the video to the song "One"[3] by Metallica.
For what it's worth, Morse doesn't actually work via tapping (unless you add scraping as the dash component). Tapping makes no distinction between dots and dashes; what you intend as a dash is technically a dot and a pause.
Ten years ago, I made a very stupid website: a public chat that anyone can join, where you can communicate only in morse code, by tapping a single button.
Since then, I've been surprised to see a large community grow around it. More and more people are picking up morse code every day, and they appear to come from all over the world, and from all age groups.
The other side of it may be that the community that has grown around it is now just going to be annoyed by a bunch of people writing gibberish in their chat for the better part of 24 hours. :)
The september is the tourist season. Eternal september is when tourist season completely overtakes the previous communities cultures and standards and style permanently, generally through exponential growth that exceeds the old guard's ability to impress the already established culture on newcomers.
There's a "training" channel where you can practice without annoying the more fluent users. You can choose the channel with the select menu at the top of the page, where it says "ch1". I belong there for a while.
This is what I've been looking for! I've wanted to learn CW for years now but had nobody to talk to and the idea of going on public airwaves without any CW experience except practice drills didn't do a whole lot to motivate me.
Can you give advice on how to learn code? Do you perform it aurally only? Or is it worth trying to memorize the dots and dashes from a chart? https://i.imgur.com/Jw9ZdLw.jpeg
I haven't learned, but I would guess that starting with a few letters, then using spaced repetition to add more and more. Since you usually hear, not read code, aurally is probably most useful. I'm sure there are apps for this now.
The good thing is the human brain is quite good at associating specific sounds with meanings, as this is how all spoken language works. So you're just learning some new sounds for letters, not a completely new way to represent information. I'd guess that part comes pretty quickly for most people.
Learning to tap out the letters on a key is probably a bit more challenging, as that requires some physical dexterity, but like playing a musical instrument, I'm sure most people can become at least adequate at it with some practice.
As another reply said, the consensus I read is that you really shouldn't memorize the table of "-.- is K", if you do you'll likely need to "unlearn" it to get any level of speed. The best thing is not really think about the dots and dashes but train on the sound; "dah-di-dah" = K.
It's a lot like how when you read you almost never read every letter, you look at the entire word and that turns into an idea in your mind.
Huh! I'd always accepted the backronym without even thinking about it, but it makes so much more sense as arbitrary letters associated with sequences that are very easy to remember and distinguish than as a real weird acronym that just happens to have that property. You have reorganised my world in a slightly more reasonable way.
Interestingly there were competing distress signals at the time, but I guess SOS won because of its usefulness outside of morse code. As you mentioned, it's easy to remember, the letters are distinguishable and it also works upside down when written.
One of the interesting things I've heard about morse code is that once you get familiar with it you can start identifying who is sending by the slight variations and syncopations in how they send. It it almost like everyone has their own voice that is often identifiable to those familiar with it.
That is true, but it's mostly true of people sending using a straight key (basically a simple button) or a bug (semi-automated key). Most morse code operators these days use a keyer paddle, and a fair number use a computer to send morse code. Since those generate the actual dots and dashes for you, and have precise timing, you end up with less variation between people.
Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response
What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg under the table. Apparently, no one ever figured out they were doing this.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend the Victorian Internet [2] which is about the telegraph and how it was discovered, adopted and then became ubiquitous. I first read it in the late 2000s and assumed it had been written a year or two earlier but was surprised to learn it had been written in the 1990s given how prescient it was. e.g. it mentioned how local newspapers shut down because who cares about local news when you have global news?
There is also a mention of how being a telegraph operator was VERY similar to be a SWE in the late 2010s in that it paid well, job mobility was very high and it was a hard skill to learn. Edison actually got his seed capital by being a telegraph operator who pivoted into repairing telegraph equipment. There are also many comparisons that can be made to AI and how it's being adopted in the economy and affecting SWEs.
Speaking of Victorian... I was in a fire department museum in Boston this past weekend and learned that the fire boxes around the city with the levers that one would pull in case of fire would communicate their location to one of the city's central fire control rooms via a spring wound Morse code transmitter inside the box. When the firemen arrived they'd also communicate with the control rooms with a Morse code keyer and audio device inside the fire box. So firemen, or at least some of them on each brigade, had to know Morse code to get the job.
The Art and Skill of Radio Telegraphy by N0HFF[1][2] is also an interesting read, and goes into a lot of the history. I recommend it if you want to know more on the subject.
Amazon URL contains "tag=aphackernews-20" query param after following the shortened URL... does Hacker News rewrite Amazon links to include a Hacker News referral tag?! Here's the URL without all the extraneous stuff added (though maybe it will just get auto-rewritten, time to find out I guess) https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".
The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.
The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology
I just this moment realized I need a fidget toy that’s a CW key I can use for taking notes in meetings, just short things like “ask boss about thing he mentioned”.
I never practiced Morse code, but I read enough about it to quickly realize that the nice sound a friend's cool new Nokia phone made on incoming SMS messages is actually ... -- ..., literally "SMS". The year was 2002 or so. I'm still amazed that someone in Nokia really thought about it back then.
Just before arduino became a thing I had an idea to create a device that could read your your text messages by tapping out morse code on your skin somewhere, like your hip or arm.
It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.
But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.
When I was making an EEPROM programmer with an arduino, I decided to pick up the datasheet, ditch the arduino builtin stuff (I made a separate "board" which stripped the serial code out, and the time functions, because I didn't need them and they fired an interrupt needlessly wasting resources for me), and write your own interrupts for serial. It's obviously more work, but you get to implement whatever you want. You can set up an interrupt for the flow control line. The arduino libraries are shockingly inefficient and limited sometimes.
Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution
Cool! I also remember from decades ago a friend in high school taught me "SOS" and still stuck with me: 3 short, 3 long 3 short, i suppose ... - - - ...
I have never gotten the knack for decoding Morse. I'm so good with music I would have thought some of that would transfer over. It absolutely does not. Zero natural aptitude for the task.
The thing that never fails to impress me is when an old timer ham copies a signal that's basically right on the noise floor when all i can hear is static. There was an old chap at the radio club i went to and he just had incredibly well tuned hearing. Felt almost superhuman
Ha! What a timely article. Wanting to recapture the magic of the early internet ive been getting into ham radio; i got a low-powered but portable radio & built my own software for SSTV (images) and FT8 (long range pings without much meaningful content beyond "i am here, who reads me). Just today I decided that Morse is the next frontier for me.
Tried building a morse decoder in software and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to hit human performance levels.
If you ever want to see how many radio amateurs are out there in the field doing activations (summits on the air , parks on the air even bunkers on the air) in your part of the world then this website is excellent ..
Do CW contesting and occasional POTA, lots of fun. Ham radio is a pretty cool hobby that I think many tech inclined people would enjoy. There are tons of digital modes too, and with the symbol rate limit being removed lots of fun to be had.
In ham radio it's still used a lot for shortwave stuff too.
It's not really something used for real communication though. Most people I've seen just swap call signs and give a bogus "5 9" signal report. I've never really understood the fun of making long distance connections and then not actually communicating but ok.. The "contest" scene never was for me.
I hear relatively long conversations going on at higher speeds, e.g. 25-30 wpm. I think those short exchanges you mentioned only dominate at times when there's a popular contest going on.
Possible yes. I've only come across HF at field days. That's my only exposure to it.
I don't have the space for HF antennas so I don't have any radios for it either (after all, portable HF isn't really a thing either and I don't own a car in which I could have used the higher HF bands)
I was recently facing a real issue with audible phone notifications. For those that I do have enabled, I needed to quickly distinguish what just came in, and possibly from whom, because I need to react to some of them immediately, and I may not have my phone on me all the time, but it may be within earshot.
I needed some dozen of short, reasonably unobtrusive but distinct sounds. You know where this is going.
I ended up assigning a set of two-leter codes, first letter = source, second = same letter for generic, others for specific initials, so things like NN = other, EE = email, WW = WhatsApp, TB = text message from Bob.
When generating the WAVs I set it to 40 WPM where longer sequences mostly blur into "outlines", but they are short, so I manage, and I added some 0.3 s padding on both ends to account for things like sound ducking and other hiccups. Works great.
66 comments
[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 49.7 ms ] thread1. It can be transmitted by simple means through many mediums - radio waves (amateur radio, as in the article), light (turning a light on and off), sound (I once used a boat horn to communicate with another boat)... technically I could even tap it on someone's shoulder.
2. It's self-clocking; you don't need a way to synchronize between two operators. One of the amateur radio clubs within range of me, K1USN (https://www.k1usn.com/sst) runs a contest that's limited to 20wpm so that new operators can get used to interpreting Morse on the fly.
3. It's fairly easy to recover after a fault - much easier than, say, ASCII. I might lose a few characters, but much like a smudge on a written page, I can figure out where intelligible letters start again without much difficulty.
Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:
Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.
On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)
One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)
People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.
One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)
It is not. Cat is still spelled cat.
I passed my 20 wpm morse code license 30+ years ago, and when I hear code to this day, it sounds just as natural as someone spelling cat as "See Aye Tee".
Morse code is not a new language, but it is a new way of writing, which is almost the same as a new language in many ways.
You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?
- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM. - To go beyond 20WPM you have to hand-off the processing to the subconscious mind. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to build the mental muscle memory to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps. It literally took years of daily practice to get there. - Once you've mastered the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. And at some point, you start to hear entire words, not letters. - If I attempt to perceive individual letters at higher speeds I almost always end up missing the rest of the word. At these speeds, the conscious, logical brain becomes a liability that must be to be surpressed to decode effectively. As a 30 year software developer, this has been VERY difficult to do. - When I get into the flow, I don't "think" about the letters or "hear" a series of beeps. The words somehow just magically pop into my mind.
- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM. - To go beyond 20WPM you have to tap into subconscious pattern recognition, which requires engaging the subconscious mind to do the processing. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to train the brain to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps. - Once you've learned the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. Eventually you start to hear words, not letters. In fact, if I try to pick out individual letters at higher speeds I end up missing the rest of the word.
Morse code is very much like a language in that there are audible intonations that differentiate between See, Aye and Tee. Being able to copy that in your head is the same as listening to English and not needing to reach for the dictionary every other word.
- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A
- hear di-dah, think "A"
- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"
- add more and more words
Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word
I think the most common metaphor I've encountered is to penmanship. Like handwriting, Morse can be: sloppy or choppy, utilitarian or calligraphic, disjointed or well-joined, beautiful or ugly, legible or illegible, rough or smooth, languid or rushed, cramped or too spread out.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_(film)
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw
Wrote a memoir by blinking at the right time going through the alphabet ordered by frequency
There's a parallel code specifically for tapping, called "Tap Code" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code
Since then, I've been surprised to see a large community grow around it. More and more people are picking up morse code every day, and they appear to come from all over the world, and from all age groups.
The good thing is the human brain is quite good at associating specific sounds with meanings, as this is how all spoken language works. So you're just learning some new sounds for letters, not a completely new way to represent information. I'd guess that part comes pretty quickly for most people.
Learning to tap out the letters on a key is probably a bit more challenging, as that requires some physical dexterity, but like playing a musical instrument, I'm sure most people can become at least adequate at it with some practice.
It's a lot like how when you read you almost never read every letter, you look at the entire word and that turns into an idea in your mind.
Here’s another one:
https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/
I.e. it's more akin to something like a linefeed control character that could also be represented as \n.
It also had no meaning initally, so meanings like "save our souls" are backronyms (it's originally a German signal anyway).
Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) [0] went deaf later in life. He would go to meetings with his assistant and when some asked Bell a question, he would pause, say let me think about that, pause again, and then give a response
What was actually happening was that his assistant was using Morse Code + Phillips Code [1] to tap out the question on Bell's leg under the table. Apparently, no one ever figured out they were doing this.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend the Victorian Internet [2] which is about the telegraph and how it was discovered, adopted and then became ubiquitous. I first read it in the late 2000s and assumed it had been written a year or two earlier but was surprised to learn it had been written in the 1990s given how prescient it was. e.g. it mentioned how local newspapers shut down because who cares about local news when you have global news?
There is also a mention of how being a telegraph operator was VERY similar to be a SWE in the late 2010s in that it paid well, job mobility was very high and it was a hard skill to learn. Edison actually got his seed capital by being a telegraph operator who pivoted into repairing telegraph equipment. There are also many comparisons that can be made to AI and how it's being adopted in the economy and affecting SWEs.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Code
2 - https://amzn.to/4wx75KY (Victorian Internet)
And for those that don't have Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1806069602063159676.html
[1]: https://www.qsl.net/w9aml/documents/TheArtandSkillofRadioTel...
[2]: You can also find it elsewhere; the title is distinctive enough.
No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".
The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.
The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology
It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.
But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.
Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution
How quickly those disappeared, the mobile phone was replaced by the "smartphone" and we entered into an abyss of commercial surveillance
In retrospect it seems like such a brief period of time
https://qrp-labs.com/Morserino
One of the nifty features is it has wifi so you can "talk" cw over the internet (vband), but also to a training "qso bot" as well
https://hamradio.solutions/vband/
https://qsobot.online/howto/
Tried building a morse decoder in software and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to hit human performance levels.
Nice article.
https://fieldspotter.radio/
It's not really something used for real communication though. Most people I've seen just swap call signs and give a bogus "5 9" signal report. I've never really understood the fun of making long distance connections and then not actually communicating but ok.. The "contest" scene never was for me.
I don't have the space for HF antennas so I don't have any radios for it either (after all, portable HF isn't really a thing either and I don't own a car in which I could have used the higher HF bands)
I needed some dozen of short, reasonably unobtrusive but distinct sounds. You know where this is going.
I ended up assigning a set of two-leter codes, first letter = source, second = same letter for generic, others for specific initials, so things like NN = other, EE = email, WW = WhatsApp, TB = text message from Bob.
When generating the WAVs I set it to 40 WPM where longer sequences mostly blur into "outlines", but they are short, so I manage, and I added some 0.3 s padding on both ends to account for things like sound ducking and other hiccups. Works great.