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Why I'm Learning Morse Code

burakkanber.com

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Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#61

Post by VLM »

notdrunkatall wrote: post #57
rdl wrote: post #30

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 reall…

Why was crypt banned?

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?

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#62

Post by VLM »

rdl wrote: post #38
grandalf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

google for "hf mobile" or just ask at a nearby club meeting, there's enough people doing HF mobile that surely someone will give you a demonstration.

I have a "trailer hitch mount". So I can install or remove whatever I want, relatively easily and quickly. Its a slight step up from the magnet mount technique. Using the quick disconnect on the antenna I can stick a 5/8th wave 2M vertical on if I want, or a shortened 20M hamstick-alike, or whatever I want.

My favorite part is my neighborhood has enough RF smog to make HF operation basically impossible (even weak signal 6M sometimes), but a RF silent park parking lot is only a short drive away. This tends to make up for the inherent disadvantages of a small mobile HF installation.

You don't need to start with a $500 all weather autotuner or $700 screwdriver antenna and elaborate mounting plans... a simple $20 stick-type on a temporary magnet is good enough to see what its like, or basically "free" if a local will loan you some gear to see what its like (weaksignal VHF+ rovers are like that, but some HFers are like that too).

Also its a lot harder and more expensive to build an installation that will survive snow and thunderstorms at 85 MPH down the interstate and survive for years outside 24x365 than to park somewhere and slap a magnet mount on the roof and run the cable thru an open window... you'd never drive around like that, but you don't have to, so .. don't. It also cures the ignition noise puzzle... shutting off the engine in a parking lot tends to eliminate ignition noise pretty effectively LOL. Only operating while parked tends to eliminate the "distracted driving" problem too.

Like all things in ham radio, if motivated and knowledgeable you can do quite a bit quickly for free, or you can spend years and thousands if you want. Both are fun.

I found this all very entertaining when I was living in the apartment building.

The other advice I have is keep everything in a big plastic bin, so you don't forget the radio 12 volt power cable at home, or forget your logbook, or whatever else you need. And when you come home, throw the full bin in a corner of the apartment until next time.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#63

Post by VLM »

lutusp wrote: post #55
jloughry wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? I'm biased because (before the computer era) I never used anything but a straight key. I recommend a normal telegraph key for beginners -- they're easier to control and they produce an appreciation for the simplest possible form of radio and wired communication: This picture -- http://www.mtechnologies.com/ameco/k4a.jpg -- is of a real antique, but one still a…

I agree with your remarks and extend them such that bugs and keyers usually are not built to operate slowly enough for folks starting out to use them.

Start with the straight key, and at some point you'll be able to hear faster than you can comfortably send for long periods, and start wondering what technology would allow you to send quicker... that's the time to start looking at bugs and paddles and electronic keyers and memory keyers and morse keyboards and all that kind of stuff.

Maybe bad analogy time is learn to type on a classic traditional keyboard (model M?), then start looking at the infinite array of ergonomic keyboards.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#64

Post by grandalf »

rdl wrote: post #38
grandalf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

FWIW In NYC there is an HF station at the NYC Resistor hacker space!

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#65

Post by thaumasiotes »

iopq wrote: post #56
thaumasiotes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages) As someone who watched a fair amount of anime with Japanese audio and has some very basic linguistic training, I want to comment on this idea. It's not totally clear what you mean by "two sounds that are almost identical, and do not…

The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds. The same way that you might write A or a or even α to write the letter we pronounce as "aye", a Japanese speaker might choose to pronounce [r] or [l]. A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in a…

> A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/.

There's an interesting phenomenon here. As previously mentioned, my mind has partially assimilated to losing the s/sh distinction. I had a chinese tutor who merged those two sounds, and it stopped bothering me. The same tutor also merged n/l and r/y. I didn't assimilate to those; hearing n where the word I knew used l confused me every single time.

What's relevant is that she didn't merge n/l in her english (which was not fluent). That suggests to me that she might have been able retrospectively to identify which she had just used for a mandarin word like 能 (neng). I agree that that depends on having been trained to recognize the distinction, although I find it slightly odd that she wasn't trained to make it in Mandarin. But, grand summary, I suspect a Japanese speaker could be trained to recognize the distinction even in Japanese.

More generally, I don't think the phenomenon of not distinguishing two different sounds (your Japanese speaker) is the same as the phenomenon of fantasizing that you're distinguishing two identical sounds (your english speaker).

> The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds.

I know that "a" and "A" are the same letter, but I'm easily capable of distinguishing them on demand. In fact, I'm likely to get upset when one is used where I think the other should be. I don't think that mirrors the r/l situation in Japanese. Similarly, I don't vary freely between A and a (and, owing to personal aesthetics, never write α unless I have to write cursive); I follow a fairly clear set of rules that determines one or the other. I know that situation does not reflect the r/l situation in Japanese, although I don't know that it doesn't reflect the situation of any given speaker.

Given a hypothetical Japanese speaker who's capable of producing r and l allophones, if you asked them to repeat a sentence including "are" realized as "ale", down to mimicking the accent, how likely do you think they would be to mimic that realization of [l]?

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#66

Post by toomuchtodo »

bigiain wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ship to ship laser communication fixes that :) Good luck finding the beam.

Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…

Or do it with infrared.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#67

Post by rkuester »

bkanber wrote: post #4

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?

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. ;)

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#68

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

toddrew wrote: post #15
opminion wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conten…

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.

Moreover, there are "accents." Some people's morse is very distinctive in terms of how they space the characters of some letters or the inter-letter spacing in some words.

My experience with Morse over flashing light was limited to Merchant Marine training, but before that I was a ham and spent lots of time listening to Morse code (CW) on radio. Patterns emerge and you start hearing common words more easily than their individual letters especially once you get above 15 wpm or so.

Even though after all this time I can barely remember actual letters to dot-dash conversions, I can immediately pick up the pattern of "CQ CQ CQ de XXX" (XXX is sending a request to converse out to anyone listening) and other common idioms.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#69

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

xradionut wrote: post #21

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…

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.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#70

Post by jloughry »

VLM wrote: post #63
lutusp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? I'm biased because (before the computer era) I never used anything but a straight key. I recommend a normal telegraph key for beginners -- they're easier to control and they produce an appreciation for the simplest possible form of radio and wired communication: This picture -- http://www.mtechnologies.com/ameco/k4a.jpg -- is of a real antique, but one still a…

I agree with your remarks and extend them such that bugs and keyers usually are not built to operate slowly enough for folks starting out to use them. Start with the straight key, and at some point you'll be able to hear faster than you can comfortably send for long periods, and start wondering what technology would allow you to send quicker... that's the time to start looking at bugs and paddles and electronic keyer…

Thank you! I'll begin with a traditional key, and listening.

My keyboard is an IBM Model F [1] through an interface from Hasgstrom Electronics. It has the Control key and Escape key in the old places, essential for vi.

[1] I bought the Model F from http://www.clickykeyboards.com/

[2] Pre-PC/AT keyboards won't work directly with PC/2 or USB adapters; you need a protocol converter from http://www.hagstromelectronics.com/products/ke_xtusb.html

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