I guess we'll need to wait for the HN hug of death to go away, so that we get things other than 500. After that it'd be nice if it supported my actual call sign, not "you are in this country, so clearly you must be using this club sign prefix" or whatever the pattern is.
Morse Code Chat
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Morse Code Chat
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
In aviation, VOR stations broadcast their identifier in morse (so you can confirm it's the right station) but VOR is being killed off in favor of GPS.
I think a minimum viable VOR network is planned to be maintained as a backup to GPS.
Indeed; Eurocontrol have published a handbook about it: https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/2021-10/euro...>. Here's the USA's Federal Aviation Administration's page on the topic: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...>
Re: Morse Code Chat
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
In aviation, VOR stations broadcast their identifier in morse (so you can confirm it's the right station) but VOR is being killed off in favor of GPS.
NDB stations, an even older type of radio navigation beacon, also broadcast their identifier like this. I fancy they might even outlast VORs due to how much cheaper they are to operate. The real survivor though might be the ILS (Instrument Landing System): ILS transmitters broadcast their identifier in Morse code, as did the prototypical Lorenz systems, making them very nearly a century old already (Lorenz systems we…
The one navaid likely to be around for the foreseeable future is DME. Which sounds slightly strange if you know a bit about aviation, you probably know it as slightly subservient to VOR as in VOR/DME. However, taking a number of DME fixes is a common (though slightly outdated) way of updating a fix for an aircrafts inertial navigation system.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#34If only this had existed when I was studying for my General, back when there was still a Morse requirement! Back then, there was a nightly practice session on broadcast, somewhere. Details are foggy... --- ...
W1AW, various frequencies. They still do it: http://www3.arrl.org/w1aw-operating-schedule
Funny, that call sign rings a very distant bell in my head. Maybe that was always it.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#35Just a little improvement, user-select:none on the button! At least on iOS a double tap selects the button rather than sending two events.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#36Does anyone have any data on how much use Morse Code still gets today? Are there any people still using it actively for communication, or are there literally zero practical applications anymore?
Morse code is alive and well, especially during contests where efficiency means performance. There are a few reasons:
It has high spectral efficiency; a CW transmission is only a few Hertz wide on the spectrum, whereas even SSB voice needs several kHz. This lets you use very narrow receive filters, to cut out adjacent noise and make contacts in difficult conditions.
It can achieve useful communication at very low power, with very simple equipment. Look up "qrp cw kit" and you can get $15 transmitters that you solder together from parts in a few minutes, and these aren't VLSI parts like some wifi chip or whatever, these are single discrete components. Hams love hand-built equipment, or at least the theoretical ability to use hand-built equipment, and QRP (low-power operation) is a hugely popular challenge.
It occupies a sweet spot where it's simple enough to encode by hand and decode by ear, but also easy enough for computers to operate. So there's a wide range of automation available, from whole-band decoders to keyboard-interactive QSOs, or you can go completely bare-handed if you prefer. That makes it appeal to more people than a more modern computer-required mode like PSK31 or FT8. (Those have even higher spectral efficiency, though, so they're popular in their own way.)
Out of curiosity, what does the CQ in your username refer to?
Re: Morse Code Chat
#37Does anyone have any data on how much use Morse Code still gets today? Are there any people still using it actively for communication, or are there literally zero practical applications anymore?
A nice thing with CW is that you can get it through some really impressive noise floors. I personally never use it outside of contesting though and that barely counts since it tends to be macros.
Also, all amateur stations are required to identify regularly. Relays will ident quietly in morse so it doesn't interrupt the voice comms happening on that channel.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#38A couple years ago we made a Morse Code chatbot for an xkcd April fool's comic [1]. I learned a lot about the UX of Morse input. It can be tricky for folks new to Morse to have consistent timing around dots and dashes. Displaying the dot immediately, and transforming into a dash after the requisite delay makes a big difference because it teaches the tempo expected. I was pleased to see a similar preview in the input…
Ugh, straight-key input is so hard to get right, when keyboards have such awful springs. Offer an iambic option, especially one that uses mouse left and right buttons, and it's much easier to implement a "paddle".
I've been wondering if a cellphone's accelerometer would allow you to simply nudge the front and back of the phone itself, in the absence of any physical buttons at all, and have it run through an iambic keyer in software.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#39I guess we'll need to wait for the HN hug of death to go away, so that we get things other than 500. After that it'd be nice if it supported my actual call sign, not "you are in this country, so clearly you must be using this club sign prefix" or whatever the pattern is.
I wonder if HN could have a "hugged to death" mode where a site under stress is removed from the front page for some fraction of viewers, increasing that fraction until the site recovers, so it's shown to only as many people as it can handle.
Re: Morse Code Chat
#40Does anyone have any data on how much use Morse Code still gets today? Are there any people still using it actively for communication, or are there literally zero practical applications anymore?
Morse code (aka continuous wave/CW) is in very common use in amateur (ham) radio, predominantly in CW Contesting [0], DXing, and low power (QRP) and portable operations (like parks on the air/POTA, summits on the air/SOTA [1]) as CW an extremely robust, efficient modulation. In other words, a 5w CW signal is roughly equivalent to a 100w voice signal -- more miles per watt. Plus you can fit a lot of signals in less sp…
Also worth mentioning the beacons used to assess current propagation conditions