Why I'm Learning Morse Code

http://burakkanber.com/blog/why-im-learning-morse-code/

by bkanber • 13 years ago

77 72 13 years ago

zw123456• 13 years ago

If you think Morse code is cool, and it is, what is say is cooler, in my very humble and probably worthless opinion is this; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu,The Inca, over 500 years ago, encoded information in binary format using knots on a rope. Think about that. Cool, I think. What do you think?

vanni• 13 years ago

Working link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

bkanber6• 13 years ago

If any of you are already fluent in Morse, I'd love to hear from you! Were you able to hear full words or phrases "natively"? Did you ever have the experience of being able to identify the person on the other end merely by accent?

lutusp2• 13 years ago

First I want to answer one of your other questions -- could a skilled Morse operator identify a person by his sending style, what we called his "fist". The answer is yes, absolutely. But there's more to it than that -- each CW (continuous wave) transmitter had different characteristics, in the days when most of them were built by their operators -- some of them changed frequency slightly during each dash, some of them had noticeable clicks caused by too fast a transmitter activation and deactivation around each Morse element -- these helped one identify a specific operator along with his personal sending style.

A few years ago, about the time that the FCC abandoned the code sending/receiving requirement, I assumed that CW was dead. But lately, listening to the ham bands, I see there's a surprising amount of CW activity still present.

Were you able to hear full words or phrases "natively"?

Over time one begins to hear entire words, especially at high sending rates. This is especially true for common words, words that are part of every contact ... example "Name is (name)": "-. .- -- . .. ... .--. .- ..- .-.."

Here's a sample:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ad6oibxzhzk4rvy/morse_example.mp3

As this example MP3 shows, in modern times we can avoid the quirks of manual keying by letting a computer create perfectly shaped Morse characters for us. :)

bkanber6• 13 years ago

Thank you for this! It's so cool (and I'm glad you were able to confirm) that you can recognize an operator by his fist--just like a voice.

I had also read about each radio having its own quirks, but in my excitement forgot to include that in the article!

jloughry4• 13 years ago

I encourage any hacker to take a look some time at the beautiful 'bugs' still (!) made by Vibroplex [1].

I have wanted to learn Morse ever since I read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [2]. I know people use keyboards nowadays---and even software to read Morse and translate it automatically into text---but I want to learn to send it by hand. Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? (I just love the look of those beautiful machines with tiny pendulums and jewelled bearings and neodymium magnet 'springs'...). I also wonder about electronic keyers with paddles. What works best for a beginner who wants to develop a good 'fist'?

[1] http://www.vibroplex.com/

[2] Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet. New York: Walker and Company, 1998. ISBN 978-0-8027-1604-0.

grandalf4• 13 years ago

I learned morse at age 11 when I first got interested in ham radio. It took a couple of months of frequent use before it really felt natural, and this was probably about when I started perceiving words rather than characters.

It gets easier and easier the more you use it...

xradionut2• 13 years ago

As a ham operator, there are standard phases and exchanges that make contacts easier. (Especially in a contest.) After time it becomes second nature. In "normal" or "ragchews" exchanges with older hams, you may have to brush up on medical and anatomic words and phases.

nlh• 13 years ago

Other great answers here -- I'll add my $.02, well, just because.

Ham here as well (K2KD). I had most of my experiences as a kid (6th - 8th grade), had an HF rig in my bedroom, and made my way through Extra class (which, I think, required a 20 WPM morse test).

I'd liken hearing common CW phrases not so much as hearing "the phrase" in its entirety / natively, but more akin to listening to a song or tune you're familiar with. Your brain knows what the next word / note is going to be, so that's queued up in your head (and why you can hum along with a tune you know).

Same with morse code -- you'll start to hear a familiar pattern and you'll just know how it's going to continue. Things like "CQ" were VERY common to hear and you always knew that pattern (-.-. --.-). Or signing off, you knew when someone was starting to say 73 (--... ...--) so you'd end up "singing along" with the words to the song you knew (metaphorically-speaking).

I was quite experienced with it and even now, 20 years later, I still know the alphabet. But I'd never say I got to true language-less fluency -- the code always translated into letters for me (either written or in my head), except in the cases above (I can hear a CQ now and not think "CQ" but instead hear it as the universal beacon call...da dit da dit..da da dit da......da dit da dit..da da dit da...)

Good memories - glad you're giving it a try!

rkuester• 13 years ago

There was a time when you could identify the entire country of Cuba by the "accent" of their CW signals. For whatever reason, probably the popularity of certain homebrew gear designs there, most Cuban CW signals had a characteristic "chirp" due to the frequency shifting a little at the start of each dot and dash. That, and sometimes their average frequency would drift up or down the band, and you'd have to chase them around.

I had a lot of fun with radios as a kid (15--20 years ago). It was so magical to talk all across the world from your bedroom. Then this whole Internet thing happened. ;)

jliechti1• 13 years ago

> This brings me to my fascination with Morse code. Granted, learning Morse code today may be a futile exercise. After all, I don’t know a single person who speaks it!

From what I understand, ham radio operators still use morse code, although they phased out the requirement to be proficient in Morse code somewhat recently. So I don't think it is completely futile to learn.

"Demonstrating a proficiency in Morse code was for many years a requirement to obtain an amateur license to transmit on frequencies below 30 MHz. Following changes in international regulations in 2003, countries are no longer required to demand proficiency.The United States Federal Communications Commission, for example, phased out this requirement for all license classes on February 23, 2007."

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio

Ham radio operators also perform duties in emergency situations, including disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

"More than a thousand ham operators from all over the U.S. converged on the Gulf Coast in an effort to provide emergency communications assistance. Subsequent Congressional hearings highlighted the Amateur Radio response as one of the few examples of what went right in the disaster relief effort."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio_emergency_communi...

bkanber6• 13 years ago

You're 100% correct. There is definitely an amateur radio community out there, and many of them are fluent in Morse. I guess I was just trying to say that nobody in my "natural" social circles knows Morse. But if I start hanging out with the right types of people, I'm sure I could communicate in dahs and dits all day!

danso• 13 years ago

It's too bad we don't teach this as part of language development at the primary school level. As someone who's tried to teach programming to lay persons, I can't help but think that having first-hand practical knowledge of how language can be encoded in a kind-of-binary (quinary, according to Wikipedia) system would be an extremely useful abstract concept to have in mind.

It's certainly more useful than learning cursive.

toddrew3• 13 years ago

I spent nine years as a naval communicator and am fluent in morse. It's been a few years so I would definitely need a bit of practice to get back up to 12 words a minute on a flashing light.

I can speak three languages and morse was similar to learn. From the first day of training they gave us sheet of paper with the alphabet and the morse translation and told us to memorize a couple of letters. Then they sent us outside to spend hours staring at a flashing lightbulb.

When you recognize a letter your writer (someone with a clipboard standing facing you and away from the light) would write it down, and when you didn't recognize the letter you said "MISS".

The first day was spent saying "MISS... MISS... MISS..." It was extremely frustrating, the same way being immersed in a new language can be. It felt useless... as if I would never get it. Every day we'd spend the morning staring at the light, and little by little we started to get more letters.

Once we mastered it (100%) they would turn up the speed and we'd be back to where we started... "MISS... MISS... ECHO... MIKE... MISS... MISSS..." until we perfected that speed and were moved up again.

It took about three months of daily practice to get up to the military's standard.

I catch myself years later spelling out words in morse in my head.

bkanber6• 13 years ago

I love anecdotes like this. Were you taught Morse purely visually, with the flashing bulb? Do you find it easier to watch a bulb or to listen to a tone?

toddrew3• 13 years ago

It was always visual. It seemed useless at the time, spending hours out in the pouring rain on a ship, sending a message with a flashing light to another ship, but they always reminded us that even with all our technology and cryptography, flashing light is still the most secure method of close ship-to-ship communications because it's directional when using focused light.

opminion• 13 years ago

More than a language, Morse is a script (or whatever is the generalisation of "script" to other transport layers than the written page), isn't it? The fact that you experienced learning Morse similar to learning a new language is rather surprising. For example, I would expect that you can transliterate random Morse into ASCII, perhaps at a lower bitrate, and, if so, the role of understanding the meaning of the content would be far less important than when learning a new language.

toddrew3• 13 years ago

Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light.

When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.

INTPenis• 13 years ago

That gives me a great idea, to write a program that flashes the terminal bell in order to give a similiar educational experience in learning morse.

andrewcooke• 13 years ago

when i used to walk an hour to work (and another back), i considered using morse as an interface to a portable computer (for editing and playback of text). it's easy to hear and understand, even when there's considerable ambient noise, and data entry would only require a single button (plus perhaps a rocker switch or similar to scan through existing data).

at the time i had no real idea how to implement it. now i think i could do something with an arduino or similar. but thankfully i now work from home...

bkanber6• 13 years ago

I've also thought about a pocket-sized clicker device that you could use to send Morse to your friends, perhaps interfaced with your phone. Or maybe, as you said, you could use it as an input device. One day when I have some extra time on my hands I'm sure I'll sketch one out. But I've got to learn Morse first! ;)

grandalf4• 13 years ago

I've been licensed as a ham radio operator since I was a kid (had an odd, early fascination with radio) and recently got back into it a few years ago.

I find using morse code extremely relaxing b/c it taxes your perceptual system in a way that is fairly uncommon in today's world. Either b/c it is being sent very fast or b/c of a weak signal and ionospheric noise, it's a "full brain" immersion exercise that leaves me feeling relaxed and contented (yes I know it sounds a bit odd).

I recommend it highly. Even for those not interested in radio, there are competitions for high speed morse (it's big in eastern Europe)... check out some of the training software:

http://fkurz.net/ham/qrq.html

and

http://www.rufzxp.net/

Of course, real ham radio contests offer the best combo of adrenaline and strategy...

zbinga• 13 years ago

Titrate is invisible.

RougeFemme• 13 years ago

I learned Morse Code as a Girl Scout and became fluent for the intellectual challenge. I'm definitely no longer fluent but could get by in an emergency with a quick refresher.

xradionut2• 13 years ago

Ex-ham and ex-military radio operator/tech here.

Morse code, (CW), is a semi-valuable skill for radio operators, especially hams that do HF and weak signal work. It takes experience, but at a certain point the letters become words and the words become phases. It's no longer a requirement for a amateur radio license, but it's still used and useful. (If you want to learn, I suggest the Koch method.)

With the advance of radio technology, especially computers, DSP and SDR, digital modes modes other than CW have better performance. You can decode a whole band of signals digital/CW with the combination of a SDR receiver and software on a decently powered computer.

But the advantage of CW is that you can use really "primitive" inexpensive radios as transmitters and flexible humans as encoders/decoders.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 13 years ago

And as a teenager with almost no money this was important to me. I built the classic "Tuna-tin Two" transmitter from the schematic I found in the high school library and most of my money went to buying the $15 brass and plastic transmitter key from some (probably long defunct) store in downtown Brooklyn, NY.

capkutay• 13 years ago

Cool article! "Code" by Charles Petzold[0] talks about morse code while covering ways that we encode data. May be a good read for anyone interested in this topic.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

pjbrunet• 13 years ago

I tried learning in middle school and just memorizing all the letters was a pain. At that age it's just not that exciting, at least for me it wasn't. I can totally appreciate the value of it now, the ability to send messages around the world with just an antenna. My wave is bigger than yours, or something like that, LOL.

unoti2• 13 years ago

It's easier to just memorize, say, 2 letters, then practice telling those two letters apart from each other. Then you add another letter...

Todd• 13 years ago

I learned Morse Code as a 12 year old while working towards my ham radio license. It was a challenge, especially getting to 13 WPM. The 20 WPM requirement of the Extra class was the main reason I didn't go for that one at the time.

Even to this day, over two decades later, I can still generate and recall Morse (albeit slowly). This is one reason I urge young people to study something meaningful and lasting while they're still in school. I wish I had an adult who had told me that when I was young. I still know a lot about electronics, RF, antenna design, etc. but I wish I had internalized mathematics fundamentals or a foreign language instead. I still believe that one reason Richard Feynman was so facile with physics and mathematics was because of the notebooks he and his friend kept while they were kids.

unoti2• 13 years ago

There are practical reasons to learn it, if you do radio operations. A morse signal doesn't require the same bandwidth that a voice signal requires, so you're able to focus the power of the transmitter into a tighter bandwidth, and broadcast with more power than a voice signal. In addition, you can understand the information in a morse signal in the presence of much more interference than you can understand a voice signal. So it's actually quite practical when doing radio operations to use morse, even today.

16s2• 13 years ago

In many cases, you need only a few watts (5 or less) and with a good antenna can transmit globally.

rdl3• 13 years ago

I'm not really into morse/CW, but I'd strongly encourage people to try out ham radio. You can buy an adequate radio for $31 on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-UV-5R-136-174-400-480-Dual-Ban...) and can get licensed in about 2-4 hours for $0-30.

There was a period of maybe the 1980s-2000 where radio was dying (it was all old people who were defending their turf), but in the past 13 years it seems to have really turned around -- more activity on the 2m/440 HT scene, disaster stuff, etc. You can do crazy things like run 1500W wifi. Operate RC. Work space stations (satellites, the ISS, etc.) Weird propagation stuff (sunspot related, meteors, the moon...).

The only lingering problem I have with amateur radio is the ban on crypto, but you can get around that by developing encrypted protocols but publishing the keys in routine use, or moving the equipment to non-ham bands with secret keys later.

viraj_shah2• 13 years ago

Is the test 2-4 hours or is the learning process and test 2-4 hours for the basic license?

rdl3• 13 years ago

Learning process and test, if you're smart, can be done in 4h total for Technician. There are lots of programs to do it in 8h, but IMO a tech person should be able to do it in less time. I used http://www.baears.com/ to do tech (and then studied for General during the rest breaks and got General at the same time!); it's a good choice in the Bay Area.

I should be an Extra and a Volunteer Examiner myself in a month or so, so along with 2 friends with Extra/VE could run classes. I'm planning to do crypto meetups/keysignings/etc on the Peninsula on the first friday of the month anyway (5-10pm somewhere in MV or PA, probably near Google, nominally a 2600 meeting), so doing ham exams during that would be fine, if people studied before that.

grandalf4• 13 years ago

I agree with this except would encourage anyone interested to check out HF communication before investing even $30 in VHF :)

rdl3• 13 years ago

VHF (2m) is going to be vastly more useful for emergency communications than HF in most urban areas, and for people who live in apartment buildings, etc., VHF is going to be a lot easier to actually use. I'm using a Yaesu 8800 mobile in my car now so I can cross-band repeat UHF to VHF as well, which would probably work pretty well for disaster communications.

(I'm personally most interested in UHF/EHF, myself, mainly satellite and point to point. I ran an iDirect TCP/IP Ku-band commercial/government/military network for a few years, and would love to buy some space segment on Ka band or possibly X and get back into it at some point. But I don't have a home/office with space for a dish farm right now, nor the $1-5k/MHz to lease transponders.)

If I had the ability to put up a tower or even a patio for antennas, I'd probably get a home HF station, true.

notdrunkatall• 13 years ago

Why was crypt banned?

VLM3• 13 years ago

Its "amateur" radio, not to be stolen and taken over by encrypted taxi dispatchers or pay per view encrypted TV broadcasters. The FCC likes to separate human activities by frequency band, and gets all out of whack when people try to sneak around their intentions. In no small part because of licensing procedures and fees which are darn near zilch for ham radio and quite expensive process for some LMR and broadcasting operations.

Its also kind of vital for international communication into repressive regimes (worse than the USA in 2010s anyway). Think of a kid in Wisconsin talking to a dude in Russia during the peak of the cold war, that kind of thing. Now "everybody knows" that you can trivially embed a one time pad, but at least we're not sending character groups containing who knows what to each other. So pretty much everywhere except utterly failed states, you can get an amateur radio license and just kind of hang out on the air. Its the original techie social network, from decades before the internet.

Finally at least in theory its supposed to be one big party line for general purposes and emergency communications. So partitioning the service into little encrypted groups who intentionally would not be able to talk with each other, serves exactly what purpose given the intentional regulatory design to encourage the exact opposite goal? It would be like allowing encrypted messages on Hacker News comments, which would serve exactly what purpose, if any?

shitgoose2• 13 years ago

well, if i knew morse code, i could drive and text easily. or type an email in the middle of a meeting without anyone noticing. looks like a good skill. considering learning it.

macleodan• 13 years ago

Morse is not all in the past tense, as you write.

I have learnt it, a bit, for amateur radio, where it is still used. There are lots of wee applications for it too, like showing status messages on a small electronic device using a single LED.

There have been times I have wished more people know it, for example for communicating with light accross a mountain valley, or communicating underwater.

xb95• 13 years ago

In amateur radio, the characteristics of someone's CW (morse code) is called their "fist". I used to be able to do 5 WPM and one year I participated in field day (the annual ham competition to contact as many people as you can, etc) with it -- that year was magical because I used morse code for my first time to talk to someone. The feeling of dits and dahs coming across the airwaves actually being communication from somewhere far away? It was brilliant.

So: kudos for learning an aging and mostly deprecated form of communication. Some folks still do it for hobby (I've lost all skill by this point), and I highly recommend the experience.

If nothing else, find a local ham group and go poke around in late June and see if they're doing anything for field day. It's worth checking out.

hyperbovine• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if deprecated is the right word. When the zombie invasion comes, I do not feel confident in my ability to get the cellular network back up running. I could easily build a spark gap transmitter though, using spare parts that can be found anywhere and high-school level electrical engineering. In seriousness, it seems somehow foolish to deprecate an extremely reliable, cheap and time-tested form of communication. That said, I never got far in my own attempts to learn Morse code :-)

Niten• 13 years ago

I got an early start in morse code thanks to my grandfather, who was a Navy radioman in World War II and later became a ham operator.

Sadly I never got my ham license, but it was my grandfather's obsession with radio which got me into electronics and, ultimately, software engineering. I still practice coding now and then, and morse is my go-to "hello world" for playing with new microcontrollers:

https://github.com/markshroyer/msp430-morse/blob/master/mors...

asgard1024• 13 years ago

I wonder, given that Morse Code is pretty old, are there any better (for humans) codes for text as a binary stream?

I mean better in different ways - easier to learn, less error prone, shorter,..

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

It seems like the sort of universal, deprecated but never gone, sort of system of communication that would be useful in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

jlgaddis• 13 years ago

Like many of the others in the thread, I first learned CW in order to upgrade my ham license (I started as a "No-Code Tech" and wanted HF privileges, which required passing a Morse Code exam).

As you develop proficiency in receiving–or “copying”–Morse, you start hearing the characters rather than the dashes and dots.

I was attempting to explain this to someone else a long time ago and they had trouble really understanding what I meant until I described it another way -- think about how toddlers first learn to read. They initially begin by learning each individual letter, then how a couple letters in a specific order make a specific sound and form different words.

As your reading comprehension increases, you no longer read letter by letter. Instead, your brain recognizes a sequence of letters as words. As you are reading this post, you are reading words, not the individuals letter that compose them.

When trying to increase the speed at which you can "copy" Morse Code (which is done simply by reducing the space (time) between characters), you stop hearing the dits and dahs and instead learn to recognize individual letters. After a while, you'll even begin to recognize (some) words just by their sound.

Past the age of 17 or 18, I've never "used" Morse Code for anything practical but it is still stuck in my brain and I can still "copy". At least I know that if I were to ever become paralyzed and unable to speak or move my appendages, I could at least still communicate with others (by "blinking" the dits and dahs).

KaiserPro• 13 years ago

.._. ..- -.-. -.-

16s2• 13 years ago

http://www.livephysics.com/tools/mathematical-tools/morse-co...

Why I'm Learning Morse Code

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