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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.
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.
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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…
> 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".
Morse code is very much like a language in that there are audible intonations that differentiate between See, Aye and Tee. Being able to copy that in your head is the same as listening to English and not needing to reach for the dictionary every other word.
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Interestingly there were competing distress signals at the time, but I guess SOS won because of its usefulness outside of morse code. As you mentioned, it's easy to remember, the letters are distinguishable and it also works upside down when written.
CQD lost out
One of my favorite stories about Morse Code: 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 und…
[1]: https://www.qsl.net/w9aml/documents/TheArtandSkillofRadioTel...
[2]: You can also find it elsewhere; the title is distinctive enough.
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…
One of my favorite stories about Morse Code: 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 und…
Speaking of Victorian... I was in a fire department museum in Boston this past weekend and learned that the fire boxes around the city with the levers that one would pull in case of fire would communicate their location to one of the city's central fire control rooms via a spring wound Morse code transmitter inside the box. When the firemen arrived they'd also communicate with the control rooms with a Morse code keye…
And for those that don't have Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1806069602063159676.html
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was well-known back in the day. I even did morse ringtones per a caller for few frequent ones. Even if you don't read it by ear, they are very distinctive.
Great idea!
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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…
> 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".
- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A
- hear di-dah, think "A"
- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"
- add more and more words
Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word