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.
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.
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. :)
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".
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.
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
Read up on the Koch method. To be exact: Koch method with Farnsworth timing. You'll have to keep the letters in a certain speed so your brain does not have enough time to decode dots and dashes. So only the length between the letters is extended to lower the difficulty. The idea is that the lowest unit of comprehension are letters. After training you'll hear a -.- and don't even think of it as dots and dashes, it's just a K obviously.
You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M).
I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.
There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.
Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.
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.
I think I just joined an eternal September on your site. It might be nice to add a practice mode that doesn’t spam everyone with nonsense.
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.
I respect you not linking the website to farm clicks. That said, drop the website link please.
Found it: https://morse.halb.it/
Source: https://github.com/robalb/morsechat
Is it supposed to have audio? I didn't hear anything.
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. :)
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".
Fun fact: The one morse code that most people probably know, SOS, is not actually sent as three letters S-O-S but as one distinct code.
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).
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.
A few months ago I had Claude build a morse code trainer web app, it was pretty fun but my interest waned: https://morsetrainer.linsomniac.com/
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
Read up on the Koch method. To be exact: Koch method with Farnsworth timing. You'll have to keep the letters in a certain speed so your brain does not have enough time to decode dots and dashes. So only the length between the letters is extended to lower the difficulty. The idea is that the lowest unit of comprehension are letters. After training you'll hear a -.- and don't even think of it as dots and dashes, it's just a K obviously.
You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M). I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.
There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.
Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.