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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.