If you were in Tunisia in October, you might have caught some of the Morse Code championships this year. If you didn’t make it, you could catch the BBC’s documentary about the event, and you might be surprised at some of the details. For example, you probably think sending and receiving Morse code is only for the elderly. Yet the defending champion is 13 years old.
Teams from around the world participated. There was stiff competition from Russia, Japan, Kuwait, and Romania. However, for some reason, Belarus wins “almost every time.” Many Eastern European countries have children’s clubs that teach code. Russia and Belarus have government-sponsored teams.
Morse code is very useful to amateur radio operators because it allows them to travel vast distances using little power and simple equipment. Morse code can also assist people who otherwise might have problems communicating, and some assistive devices use code, including a Morse code-to-speech ring the podcast covers.
The speed records are amazing and a young man named [Ianis] set a new record of 1,126 marks per minute. Code speed is a little tricky since things like the gap size and what you consider a word or character matter, but that’s still a staggering speed, which we estimate to be about 255 words per minute. While we can copy code just fine, at these speeds, it sounds more like modem noises.
Learning Morse code isn’t as hard as it sounds. Your computer can help you learn, but in the old days, you had to rely on paper tape.
QLF?
QNB?
AS QTP
Useless. Que live in year 2024. Not 1900.
Not useless, but you do have a point there, although Morse code has been around since 1844. I myself have problems with the different character lengths, since if you stack a bunch of “E”s and “I”s together, it’s really hard not to lose track. I would suggest moving forward to the 1870s, when the 5-bit Baudot code was invented. And while not even the US Navy uses Morse code any more, there is still plenty of communications being done in Baudot. I think. Although this has been used in Teletype machines and for radioteletype transmission ever since, its use actually predates the invention of machines for printing it. Originally, to send a character, you had five keys (like piano keys), of which the left hand operated two and the right hand three. There WAS a machine with a rotating contact that read the states of all five switches and time-multiplexed them to send down a telegraph wire, but’s not clear to me how the operators read the codes, but I would guess that was with an electromechanical ticker, just as Morse telegraphers did. Anyway, the advantage as I see it is that even though the most frequently used letters had the fewest keypresses and therefore the simplest to recognize codes, all characters take the same amount of time, so no matter what the mix of short and long characters is, the time the operator has to recognize each character is the same, which I think probably makes it easier to recognize at a fast rate than the more chaotic Morse code.
In any case, AS WAS SAID IN THE ARTICLE, on/off codes like Morse are much more power efficient than analog signals like voice and TV, so they will still have a place in the world for many more years.
5-level Baudot has the advantage of using less bandwidth than 8 level ASCII. But all the cool kids are on satellite these days…until they aren’t (sunspots, bad data upload…whatever). Then they drop back to HF.
5-Bit Baudot is 7-Bit, actually. Start/Stop bit..
Anyway, I think Baudot simply has cult status. People love it for sentimental reasons (me, too).
Where else can you send “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.
ASCII doesn’t need it as much as Baudot does.
Satellites. QO-100 is going strong. The people up there there are full of dedication.
Building a sat station requires not only investment of money and intellect, but also love for amateur radio. And spirit of adventure.
A vast different experience to usual FM repeater or 80m gossip.
HF is for the old elitists who refuse to move on and evolve, I think.
Btw, there’s also an morse telegraphy segment on QO-100. With lots of activity.
No, 5-bit Baudot is 5-bit. If it is being transmitted asynchronously there are also start and stop signals for each character. When using a computer to send asynchronously the start and stop signals are simulated by transmitting them at lengths which are multiples of the lengths of the data payload components. However, these lengths aren’t always correct.
” if you stack a bunch of “E”s and “I”s together, it’s really hard not to lose track. ”
Just as a self-taught guitar player can get into habits that ultimately must be un-learned in order to achieve mastery, the same holds true for Morse. If you “lose track” it’s likely because you are counting symbols instead of perceiving Morse characters holistically as all masters do: as a spoken language like French, German, or English. Stop countin and just listen.
I heard tell of a guy who would leave his ham radio receiver on while he watched the 6 oclock news on TV. Even at 25 wpm he could follow conversation on both, at the same time, while relaxing in his Lazyboy with a beer. Thats’s impossible if your decoding methodology boils down to three-dots-and-a-dash means “V”.
Yes, this is why you can read those stupid things with missing letters or sight read music, or why language immersion is best. If you’re translating everything, you’re way too slow and not very good at it.
Its even more impossible if your decoding methodology boils down to three-dots-and-a-dash means “R”
Regardless of your internal representation of the codes, the essential thing is that it takes time for a human mind to recognize a character. In Morse code, you need the pattern of dots and dashes (and how that pattern is recognized is up to you), but you also need to wait until you hear the inter-character gap to know what character you just heard. Only then can you act on that recognition. My point is that the recognition takes time, and if your characters are many different lengths, then you can’t transcribe a random sequence of characters (as is needed for many types of pseudo-random information, such as radio call signs and cryptographic 5-letter sequences, for example, unless you can transcribe a string of the shortest characters accurately. To me it’s not a valid test to see how quickly you can read complete sentences composed in English, because an accomplishment like being able to transcribe 20 English words in a minute is not as useful as being able to transcribe to 20 5-letter random sequences per minute.
Also, BTW, three-dots-and-a-dash means ‘V’, so I’m not sure how qualified you are to talk about effective ways to recognize pulse width coded sequences.
My argument is that it might be easier to learn to transcribe 20 WPM Baudot than 20 WPM Morse, because all of the characters are the same length. Your response is that I haven’t learned Morse properly, which I don’t think addresses my argument at all. Transcription isn’t just hearing and recognizing characters, it also requires entering those characters into a record, like a piece of paper, by writing or typing, or maybe just recording the words being spoken. And for the case of typing, the more consistent your character rate is, the faster you can type.
I’ve found out that if you can count dits/dahs, you are doing it wrong. You need to learn to hear sound sequences as whole. Then it develops to hearing complete words.
Morse code is basically a new language. One doesn’t listen spoken language by separating charaters.
So if someone is sending at 5 WPM and you’re counting dits & dahs because it’s too slow for you to otherwise recognize the characters, then you’re doing it wrong? I beg to differ. Also, the methods needed to increase recognition speed change as you get faster, so “doing it wrong” depends on what your current level is. Are you suggesting that someone starting from absolute scratch must not coun dits & dahs? Just how did you get to 10 WPM in the first place?
Pick your favorite sport that you actively participate in … assuming you have one. What is it’s real utility? Not actually very much other than the enjoyment of it.
For example, I like to play basketball, and I like to participate in Morse code contests … for exactly the same reasons. Both are enjoyable, and both give me exercise … one for my body and one for my mind. If you don’t think that Morse code exercises the brain you probably shouldn’t be posting here.
I also enjoy playing online video games (presumably you do as well), and I challenge you to name a more fundamentally useless activity than that.
“I also enjoy playing online video games (presumably you do as well), and I challenge you to name a more fundamentally useless activity than that.”
Watching handegg (Aussie name for that American sport with the oddly shaped ball) live, gets boring waiting in between short bursts of action. Also applies to most other sports but to a lesser extent. And don’t forget the annoying ads that have become a cancer lately. Much more enjoyable to save the stream and fast forward past the boring bits.
Not entirely. Aviation beacons identify in Morse (still), and so do analog FM transmitters and repeaters in the public service bands. It’s a simple way to send data that doesn’t require any extra equipment to receive. It’s also very spectrum-efficient.
It is very usefull and very fun. Almost like an art.
I learned CW this year and been using it on bands for frew thousand QSOs already. My receiving speed currently is 20 WPM.
I love it!
Ever heard of International Chopin Piano Competition? Dude died in 1849! They should get over it and move one! ;-)
.- .– . … — — .
How the system flagged this as spam, I’ll never know!
AAESTTE
A ? ESLLE or
A??&LLE
Even trying American Morse the spacing is all weird.
And there are three different dash lengths. And the three dots (S?) are actually typed as an ellipsis instead of three dots
Would really like to know what this represents.
AWESOME ?
With the DAHs not being separated, it is hard to read in that format.
In the versions of Morse code used today, the spacing isn’t weird at all. All dots are the same length, all dashes are the same length, the space between dots and dashes is always the same length, the spaces between each character are always the same length, and the spaces between words are always the same length, and these spaces are all well defined. So no, there are not three different dash lengths. When you see people printing out Morse code, like -.. .- -..- -.-., these symbols are not meant to represent equal lengths of time, or lengths of time that are proportional to the symbol’s width on a screen; they are just a convenient way of using text to represent Morse code. The length of those hyphens or dashes or whatever on your screen don’t represent anything at all.
Craig, and now I realize you are commenting on the string that was supposed to be Morse code, that wasn’t visible when I read your comment, so .. never mind.
And the USA is absent. Kids think the phone etc. is the get all get out.
I had a kid ask me about my radio once. I told him I use it to talk to people around the world.
He said he could do that with his phone. I replied, OK do it with no cell or wireless service. :)
Uh huh. I’m no speed demon on CW but I know most of the characters. I do use it from time to time
but not enough to be really proficient at it.
This.
… access to worldwide comms without relying in infrastructure.
Your comment about kids in the US and their cellphones is as true as it is cringe-worthy.
I thank God that the young me had no access to cell phones or video games. I spent my childhood in exploration… hiking someplace, digging a hole, working on a minibike, climbing a tree and building a fort from scrap, tearing apart a garage-sale radio or tv to see how it works.
With rare exception modern kids are bred to be consumers.
But it’s not just the kids. Okay, they expect that the Internet and the cellular networks is a given, because it always has been, to them, but most people who grew up before the Internet an cell phones also expect the easy acquisition of food, water, and electricity. Take away people’s electricity for a week in the coldest of winter or the hottest of summer, and they’ve already started dying. But that’s the easiest one. Take out the supermarket, take out the gas station, and things are going to get serious, fast. We’ve ALL been trained to be consumers.
Read any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books sometime. Yeah, I know these were meant for children, but they were written in the 1930s to teach children of that time how life and survival worked in the 1870s, before all of the modern conveniences were available.
Don’t worry, there’s still Canada!
Just kidding. ;)
Also, USA had been on list in in 2021.. That’s not too long ago.
Maybe the pandemic had caused the absence on the championships in last years?
http://www.highspeedtelegraphy.com/HST-world-championships/Results-teams
I’ve thought a few times of learning morse. I’m not a radio guy, but I do quite a lot with microcontrollers, and morse can be a way to get some data in and out of a microcontroller with minimal hardware. I even went as far as spending a bunch of hours (Divided over a week or so) to learn a few morse characters. If you ever want to learn morse, start by figuring out HOW to learn it. Starting by learning at a slow speed is a very bad method. You have to start at the right speed right from the start to train your muscle memory the right way from the start.
But in the end I gave up quite quickly. Simply using a serial port for data simply has too many other advantages for uC’s.
IIRC, a Silicon Graphics machine (Onyx?) would beep out a Morse SOS when it detected a system error.
grrr. reminds me that my motherboard will do the bog standard counted beeps for no-video-output errors, but the manufacturer innovated: the paper manual no longer contains a table of them!! spent all that time digging through piles to find it, for nothing
Don’t give up, please. Learn to recongize a few Q Codes (CQD, CQ etc), 73 and SOS and numbers (o to 9), maybe. But at standard speed, as a melody.
That’s good enough to hear the beeps of your homebrew morse weather station.
Remember, any morse knowledge is better than none.
It’s like with learning German or French, I would say.
Being able to speak and understand a few common sentences makes a difference.
The people will treat you much better if they see that you try, especially if they see that you do even though you struggle.
Maybe not a good example. I spent six months learning French, then went to Paris to find it not useful in the least!
Did you try this method:
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/21/learning-morse-code-the-ludwig-koch-way/
?
I once downloaded morse mania on my phone to kill some time. Tried once but got feeling it could be effective.
Somewhere was an article about very high speed Morse code. It does just sound like noise and at that point it really is language. They hear sounds and understand the meaning directly. They don’t specify how they send or what them sending speeds are though. With a straight key about 20-25 WPM is tops. side swipe and cooties a bit faster then you’re talking about iambic paddles. But even those at above like.. 60WPM IIRC is very hard.
.
For me…The pure joy of using my bug is hard to beat. I do feel bad for the people trying to copy it though. I’m trying, honest! When I really want to be not-sucky fist it is just the OG straight key, like 15 WPM.
“estimate to be about 255 words per minute”
Nope. Don’t buy that.
I “could” do 20+ many years ago and know a guy who can do
60 to 80 WPM. But 255!!! Ain’t no way.
That’s like 1200baud packet. Something else at play here.
People are amazing. I guess it’s comparable to solving a rubriks cube in under 4 seconds.
I had a drum teacher who was also a ham radio enthusiast, and he heard and played Morse like it was some super-extended rudiments. He was crazy fast on both fronts — blew me away as a teenager.
He said he learned “phrases” of common letter pairs and trios, so he knew what “er” and “ing” were, rather than hearing letters anymore. Much closer to how we all read by just looking at the shapes of the words, I guess.
Elliot, given your recollection, perhaps you’d appreciate this
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6XHwygN9CKM&pp=ygUMVmFkcnVtIG1vcnNl
Hats off also to the engineer that made the bug, to both endure and function smoothly at 255 WPM.
Well, Tom, you’re simply wrong. The world record (set by that same Romanian kid) is indeed around 255 wpm. It’s all recorded and documented from various competitions, which you could have discovered before posting in error.
Interestingly enough, the Romanian can receive that fast but struggles to send even 25 wpm.
Then the test he competed in wasn’t a very useful test. And what was he transcribing Morse code INTO? It’s not a useful metric if you can’t record it. So was he typing at 255 WPM? Speaking the words at 255 WPM? (By the way, that’s more than four words per second.)
This sounds like a Guinness Book of Records type of record, where an extremely specific thing is being measured that has zero application in the real world.
In the real world, amateur radio is the only current application of high-speed Morse code, and this requires sending and receiving, and not just english-language words and sentences, but also the pseudo-random sequences (“call signs”) used for identifying each other. A useful speed test should contain all of this.
very rough estimate, i’m getting 255 word/min * 5 char/word * 7 bit/char / 60 sec/min = 150 bits/sec. so still pretty far from 1200bps :)
i’d easily believe someone could learn to receive that fast. sending that fast would be quite the accomplishment. but it’s hard to rule out. when a competitive sport evolves on its own, separate from practical use, the participants often develop absurd capabilities and techniques. and, not to disparage anyone’s abilities, but competitive abilities like this are sometimes very fragile too. not useful outside of the carefully-controlled environment of the competition.
1200 bps would be unrealistic. In ASCII, that would be 1200 WPM (rule of thumb for 8bit-1start-1stop, 1 bit/sec is approximately 1 WPM). In practice, the slowest standard Baudot speed is 45.45 bits/second, and since it takes 6.6 bit times (minimum) to send each character, that would come to 6.8 characters/sec, which by rule of thumb is 68 WPM. I don’t think that the bit rate is significant – where the difficulty lies is in how many characters/second you can recognize. Let’s do an exercise: if our objective is to be able to transcribe 25 WPM, this is roughly 2.5 characters/second regardless of the code used. In the case of Baudot, 2.5 char/s * 6.6 bits/char = 16.5 bits/s. Is that more reasonable? Probably.
Another example: I can currently transcribe 15 WPM in Morse, or 1.5 char/s. In Baudot this would be 10 bits/s. I could definitely do that. In ASCII it would be 15 bits/s. Not too sure about that.
The standard length word is .—. .- .-. .. … “PARIS”. A dash is 4 spaces long, a dot is 2 spaces long, an inter character space is 3 spaces and inter word is 7 spaces by ITU convention. 24 wpm is a dot on time of 50 ms. The standard word length is 55 dot on times long. Not sure what is wrong with the speed statements as they don’t follow ITU practice.
The common saying is that above 20 wpm you run out of people to talk to. The long standing record is around 150 wpm.
255 wpm is not plausible. Nor is 1126 “marks per minute” fast. E is the shortest “mark”. PARIS is 55 dit on times long, so even if you interpret “1126 marks per minute” as 1126 Es per minute it’s only 41 wpm. 1126 * 2 / 55 = 40.9 wpm.
Recognizing words and abbreviations as a unit rather than characters is key. Try talking to someone by spelling out words and you’ll quickly understand why.
CW is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. I finally got my Tech after letting my 2nd Novice expire 40 years ago and plan to get my General and Extra in January. I only intend to operate QRP CW or a digital mode that has been rattling around in my head for 40 years trying to see the light of day.
Generally, Al is pretty good. But people really should know at least the rudiments before writing about a topic. Clearly not the case in this instance. Al should have known the contents of my first paragraph before writing this post.
Finally, there is a regular ARRL 40 wpm test that will earn a piece of ARRL wallpaper. Not many people have those. That’s a dit on time of 36.7 ms. Sending EISH5 as a word requires a nimble touch at 40 wpm. I managed briefly to do that at 35, but never got through the entire alphabet without word gaps faster than 25 wpm. High speed Morse is both a mental challenge and a physical challenge requiring incredibly subtle fine motor skills. Squeeze key NAKRC above 25 wpm and you’ll understand. All 5 characters are sent by pinching the paddles, but each character is a different pinch duration and starts with the opposite finger from the last character.
If you want to learn Morse checkout Morserino.info. There’s a device EOL issue at the moment, but used ones are available from time to time. There is furious activity addressing the Heltec V2 EOL problem. The Morserino is a fantastic Morse trainer far beyond anything ever created before it.
Oh, don’t just tease us like that. Tell us more about this digital mode that’s been rattling around in your head! I mean, it’s okay if it’s not ready for prime time; just a hint.