💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › zine › issue002 › yargo_morse-code-promotion-manife… captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:57:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Morse Code Promotion Manifesto

A primer on Morse code communication and the requirements to keep it alive

Morse code seems to be rather useless in these times of ubiquitous digital means of communication, but it is highly appealing if you like to keep communication independent of electronic go-betweens.

What is Morse code?

(Note: I won't go into the history of Morse code in this text, and I will only talk about the so-called "International Code", not the old "American Code" initially used on telegraph lines. Please consult your favourite Encyclopaedia for further details!)

Morse code is a representation of the Latin alphabet, numbers (figures) and some punctuation marks and control signs by long and short signals, intended for consumption by humans. It is a **ternary** encoding with the following basic elements:

short signal followed by a short pause, called "dot",
long signal followed by a short pause, called "dash",
character pause,

where the relation of duration is defined as "long" being 3 times "short". The duration of the character pause is 2 times "short"; as it always follows a signal with its accompanying "short" pause, the total pause between characters corresponds to 3 "short" pauses. Words are separated by two additional character pauses, resulting in 7 "short" pauses in total between the last signal of the first word and the first signal of the second word.

The ternary nature of Morse code permits characters of varying lengths, and the encoding was chosen to roughly correspond to the letter frequency of Western languages; for example, `E` is encoded as "dot", `T` as "dash", `I` as "dot dot", `Q` as "dash dash dot dash".

Current Use of Morse Code

While Morse code transmissions were initially the only means to transmit information by radio waves (before the availability of continuous wave oscillators), they are now only used by armed forces, radio amateurs, and some beacon and navigational systems. This is due to the fact that whilst Morse code allows for communication on very noisy channels, it still requires human operators, and there exist modern digital transmission systems which can reliably work under similar noise conditions. Human radio operators are very expensive, and therefore only armed forces and radio amateurs can afford their use and at the same time profit from the low technical requirements and high reliability Morse code offers.

It has the following advantages over other transmission types:

It requires only a channel capable of carrying binary signals (the ternary element is defined by timing), permitting use of very simple and consequently reliable/rugged equipment;
the channel can be very noisy (the limits depending on the experience and collaboration of the operators), allowing Morse code to remain usable even under very bad conditions;
the bandwidth of the channel can be very low (depending on the desired transmission speed: for experienced operators and comfortable communication in the range of 20 to 50 Hz), resulting in very good use of the available spectrum and permitting "piggybacking" on other signals.

Although best results can be achieved by auditory reception (sound or signals converted to sound), also visual or even mechanical reception (by feeling vibration or pressure) is possible. Note that Morse code can even be used to circumvent sensoric and motoric inabilities due to illness or accidents!

In my opinion, it is therefore very useful and highly recommendable to learn Morse code, but it should be done with the focus on auditory training, as any visualization of the signals will prevent the brain from making use of the musical/rhythmical nature of Morse code.

Promote Morse Code

Unfortunately, the current volume of clear text Morse code transmissions on the entire radio spectrum is very low (except for amateur radio), and therefore there is very little material on air to listen for. This makes it difficult to get people interested in learning Morse code, as "it is useless", and only radio amateurs have a chance of using it "for real".

However, it is straightforward to automatically generate Morse code transmissions with cheap modern electronics, and the almost infinite source of texts available on the internet can be used for cleartext generation. As it is much easier (and cheaper) than generating spoken word broadcasts in an appealing way, it may also be interesting from the viewpoint of distribution of information independent of big media.

The main problem preventing transmissions are legal restrictions, especially on frequency bands allowing for long distance communications. But laws in this respect vary considerably between various jurisdictions, which should be exploited as much as possible. As an intermediate step, promoting internet multicasting of cleartext transmissions might be useful, though.

If we want *to keep Morse code alive and promote learning* and use, we should therefore:

explore the various national legal possibilities of (radio) broadcasting Morse code to a larger audience,
build systems (hard- and software) facilitating automatic generation of cleartext Morse code transmissions,
organize people interested in Morse code also outside of amateur radio, with the focus on keeping communication independent of opaque digital systems.