▲ 130 points
back
80 comments
Ten years ago, I made a very stupid website: a public chat that anyone can join, where you can communicate only in morse code, by tapping a single button.
Since then, I've been surprised to see a large community grow around it. More and more people are picking up morse code every day, and they appear to come from all over the world, and from all age groups.
This is what I've been looking for! I've wanted to learn CW for years now but had nobody to talk to and the idea of going on public airwaves without any CW experience except practice drills didn't do a whole lot to motivate me.
This site makes me cackle with joy because of my failed attempts. Kind of like "QWOP."
I think I just joined an eternal September on your site. It might be nice to add a practice mode that doesn’t spam everyone with nonsense.
There's a "training" channel where you can practice without annoying the more fluent users. You can choose the channel with the select menu at the top of the page, where it says "ch1". I belong there for a while.
I respect you not linking the website to farm clicks. That said, drop the website link please.
Found it: https://morse.halb.it/
The other side of it may be that the community that has grown around it is now just going to be annoyed by a bunch of people writing gibberish in their chat for the better part of 24 hours. :)
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 under the table. Apparently, no one ever figured out they were doing this.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend the Victorian Internet [2] which is about the telegraph and how it was discovered, adopted and then became ubiquitous. I first read it in the late 2000s and assumed it had been written a year or two earlier but was surprised to learn it had been written in the 1990s given how prescient it was. e.g. it mentioned how local newspapers shut down because who cares about local news when you have global news?
There is also a mention of how being a telegraph operator was VERY similar to be a SWE in the late 2010s in that it paid well, job mobility was very high and it was a hard skill to learn. Edison actually got his seed capital by being a telegraph operator who pivoted into repairing telegraph equipment. There are also many comparisons that can be made to AI and how it's being adopted in the economy and affecting SWEs.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Code
2 - https://amzn.to/4wx75KY (Victorian Internet)
Amazon URL contains "tag=aphackernews-20" query param after following the shortened URL... does Hacker News rewrite Amazon links to include a Hacker News referral tag?! Here's the URL without all the extraneous stuff added (though maybe it will just get auto-rewritten, time to find out I guess) https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
No, now I understand what "aphackernews" is, it's "ap" short for "alexpotato".
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 keyer and audio device inside the fire box. So firemen, or at least some of them on each brigade, had to know Morse code to get the job.
I have a whole thread about how Western Union would select new telegraph operators: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1806069602063159676?s=20
And for those that don't have Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1806069602063159676.html
I second the Victorian Internet recommendation!
The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.
The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology
The Art and Skill of Radio Telegraphy by N0HFF[1][2] is also an interesting read, and goes into a lot of the history. I recommend it if you want to know more on the subject.
[1]: https://www.qsl.net/w9aml/documents/TheArtandSkillofRadioTel...
[2]: You can also find it elsewhere; the title is distinctive enough.
I just this moment realized I need a fidget toy that’s a CW key I can use for taking notes in meetings, just short things like “ask boss about thing he mentioned”.
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 to synchronize between two operators. One of the amateur radio clubs within range of me, K1USN (https://www.k1usn.com/sst) runs a contest that's limited to 20wpm so that new operators can get used to interpreting Morse on the fly.
3. It's fairly easy to recover after a fault - much easier than, say, ASCII. I might lose a few characters, but much like a smudge on a written page, I can figure out where intelligible letters start again without much difficulty.
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 before doing anything else.
On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)
One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)
People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.
One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)
> 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".
For what it's worth, Morse doesn't actually work via tapping (unless you add scraping as the dash component). Tapping makes no distinction between dots and dashes; what you intend as a dash is technically a dot and a pause.
There's a parallel code specifically for tapping, called "Tap Code" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code
I've told my family that if I'm ever in a hospital bed due and seemingly unresponsive due to injury or illness, to check whether I'm not trying to communicate (using eye movements, finger twitches, or whatever) in morse code.
Adding onto your point #1, you can tap it through rock - which has helped people who are trapped in caves communicate & get rescued!
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.
Just before arduino became a thing I had an idea to create a device that could read your your text messages by tapping out morse code on your skin somewhere, like your hip or arm.
It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.
But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.
There was also another SMS sound option on Nokia phones that literally spelled "CONNECTING PEOPLE" in Morse.
Cool! I also remember from decades ago a friend in high school taught me "SOS" and still stuck with me: 3 short, 3 long 3 short, i suppose ... - - - ...
I had a Nokia phone around that time
How quickly those disappeared, the mobile phone was replaced by the "smartphone" and we entered into an abyss of data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising
In retrospect the era of the Nokia 3310 seems like such a brief period of time
"Today we are reinventng the phone" - Steve Jobs
Thanks but no thanks
I wanted a mobile (cellular) phone and a pocket computer as separate devices
Silicon Valley ruined this
you just blew my mind
Ha! What a timely article. Wanting to recapture the magic of the early internet ive been getting into ham radio; i got a low-powered but portable radio & built my own software for SSTV (images) and FT8 (long range pings without much meaningful content beyond "i am here, who reads me). Just today I decided that Morse is the next frontier for me.
Tried building a morse decoder in software and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to hit human performance levels.
Nice article.
Fun fact: The one morse code that most people probably know, SOS, is not actually sent as three letters S-O-S but as one distinct code.
I.e. it's more akin to something like a linefeed control character that could also be represented as \n.
It also had no meaning initally, so meanings like "save our souls" are backronyms (it's originally a German signal anyway).
Huh! I'd always accepted the backronym without even thinking about it, but it makes so much more sense as arbitrary letters associated with sequences that are very easy to remember and distinguish than as a real weird acronym that just happens to have that property. You have reorganised my world in a slightly more reasonable way.
The thing that never fails to impress me is when an old timer ham copies a signal that's basically right on the noise floor when all i can hear is static. There was an old chap at the radio club i went to and he just had incredibly well tuned hearing. Felt almost superhuman
I've always called this radio or dispatcher ear.
You see it in industry that uses radio too.
I just had my first CW contact with someone in Australia from BC - using a 10W radio. It's great fun!
I was recently facing a real issue with audible phone notifications. For those that I do have enabled, I needed to quickly distinguish what just came in, and possibly from whom, because I need to react to some of them immediately, and I may not have my phone on me at all times, but it may be within earshot.
I needed some dozen of short, reasonably unobtrusive but distinct sounds. You know where this is going.
I ended up assigning a set of two-letter codes, first letter = source, second = same letter for generic, others for specific initials, so things like NN = other, EE = email, WW = WhatsApp, TB = text message from Bob.
When generating the Morse WAVs I set it to 40 WPM where longer sequences mostly blur into "outlines", but they are short, so I manage, and I added some 0.3 s padding on both ends to account for things like sound ducking and other hiccups. Works great.
Just in case anyone is interested in learning morse code or interested in amateur radio, this is a really cool gadget.
https://qrp-labs.com/Morserino
One of the nifty features is it has wifi so you can "talk" cw over the internet (vband), but also to a training "qso bot" as well
In ham radio it's still used a lot for shortwave stuff too.
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.
I hear relatively long conversations going on at higher speeds, e.g. 25-30 wpm. I think those short exchanges you mentioned only dominate at times when there's a popular contest going on.
If you ever want to see how many radio amateurs are out there in the field doing activations (summits on the air , parks on the air even bunkers on the air) in your part of the world then this website is excellent ..
One of the interesting things I've heard about morse code is that once you get familiar with it you can start identifying who is sending by the slight variations and syncopations in how they send. It is almost like everyone has their own voice that is often identifiable to those familiar with it.
That is true, but it's mostly true of people sending using a straight key (basically a simple button) or a bug (semi-automated key). Most morse code operators these days use a keyer paddle, and a fair number use a computer to send morse code. Since those generate the actual dots and dashes for you, and have precise timing, you end up with less variation between people.
Do CW contesting and occasional POTA, lots of fun. Ham radio is a pretty cool hobby that I think many tech inclined people would enjoy. There are tons of digital modes too, and with the symbol rate limit being removed lots of fun to be had.
I kinda stopped doing CW (and ham radio altogether with that). I did quite a bit of POTA hunting but it became too repetitive. And I didn't find something that felt like a small enough step up from hunting. Activating parks felt like too big of a step up. I would love to be good enough to ragchew a bit but never found a path towards that skill that felt natural to me.
A few months ago I had Claude build a morse code trainer web app, it was pretty fun but my interest waned: https://morsetrainer.linsomniac.com/
Can you give advice on how to learn code? Do you perform it aurally only? Or is it worth trying to memorize the dots and dashes from a chart? https://i.imgur.com/Jw9ZdLw.jpeg
That’s a great one.
Here’s another one:
I have never gotten the knack for decoding Morse. I'm so good with music I would have thought some of that would transfer over. It absolutely does not. Zero natural aptitude for the task.
lcwo.net is a great resource for this... however the best way is to get on the air talking to people.