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.
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.
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 is almost like everyone has their own voice that is often identifiable to those familiar with it.
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.
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.
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 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 at all times, 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-letter 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 Morse 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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 49.3 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.
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.
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)
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
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 needed some dozen of short, reasonably unobtrusive but distinct sounds. You know where this is going.
I ended up assigning a set of two-letter 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 Morse 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.