[HN Gopher] Morse Code Chat
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Morse Code Chat
Author : mindingnever
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-03-27 07:28 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (morse.halb.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (morse.halb.it)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| If 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... --- ...
| 7402 wrote:
| W1AW, various frequencies. They still do it:
| http://www3.arrl.org/w1aw-operating-schedule
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Funny, that call sign rings a very distant bell in my head.
| Maybe that was always it.
| ryancnelson wrote:
| When I saw the URL, I thought "did Smitty Halibut get a new
| domain name"? But it's not the same person/people, apparently.
| "Different fish, people!"
|
| (halibut.com is the QTH of well-known podcaster/hacker/dude Mark
| Smith)
| moron4hire wrote:
| First message I saw was someone dropping the N-word.
|
| I'm not upset at the app. Just wish we could have nice things.
| timonoko wrote:
| This sucks. I remember letters my of name, after training 2
| months in the army, but it fails to understand. - .. -- --- -.
| --- -.- ---
| timonoko wrote:
| I made one adaptive morse receiver in 1970s already and the key
| property was to measure average lengths of dashes. All other
| issues are trivial.
| knorker wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| sbenfsck wrote:
| This is a community musical instrument.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Talk about complete chaos, I love it!
| graypegg wrote:
| Just a little improvement, user-select:none on the button! At
| least on iOS a double tap selects the button rather than sending
| two events.
| luke_cq wrote:
| Does 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?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| vitaflo wrote:
| There has been a bit of a revival in CW since the pandemic in
| ham radio. Lots of hams took the time to finally learn it with
| the extra free time they had. So as far as amateur radio goes,
| it's more popular now than it has been in a long time.
| ryanianian wrote:
| For anyone looking to get serious about learning CW including
| the "protocol" for using it on amateur radio bands, check out
| CWAcademy. It's like a group class setting led by volunteer
| "old timers" who are passionate about the technology and
| community. I had no prior morse code experience and
| successfully made my way up to about 15 words per minute over
| the course of about 5 months. It takes work and patience, but
| it's a lot of fun. There's a bunch of arduino-based gizmos
| and other software that hams have made to simulate and teach
| morse-code-heavy interactions (shout-out to Morserino, Morse
| Runner, and Morse Code Ninja).
| kawfey wrote:
| That, or Long Island CW Club [0] - highly recommend either
| one. Or Learn CW Online/LCWO [1] for self-led drills and
| practice in addition to those apps.
|
| And definitely avoid charts, graphs, mnemonics, memory
| hacks, visual aids -- at all costs -- if you want
| proficiency.
|
| [0] https://longislandcwclub.org/
|
| [1] https://lcwo.net/
| myself248 wrote:
| 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?
| ksherlock wrote:
| 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.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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 were first installed in the 1930s). ILS
| approaches are the most common type for commercial aviation
| in most countries.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I think a minimum viable VOR network is planned to be
| maintained as a backup to GPS.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Indeed; Eurocontrol have published a handbook about it: <ht
| tps://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/he
| adquarters_offices/at...>
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Last year I was running a semaphore lamp off my fire escape
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPE8xHSIaKk
| kawfey wrote:
| 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 spectrum. It's slower than voice or data modes
| but you don't need to say much to exchange enough information
| for a valid contact. And learning Morse code is just fun and a
| superb mental exercise; amateur radio enables Morse code to be
| actually useful and enjoyable in the modern era.
|
| It's also used for:
|
| * amateur radio direction finding/ARDF (radio orienteering) [2]
|
| * High speed CW competitions (which used to be much more
| popular in Eastern Europe) [3]
|
| * automatic identification of radio beacons and repeaters (e.g.
| aviation Navaids like NDBs and VOR, EMS/fire/police/business
| radios)
|
| * backup/emergency communications for governments & armed
| forces
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cw+contest.
| Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgnEGSLeedg - the radio
| displays a spectrum waterfall in which you can see dozens of CW
| signals.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=parks+on+the+ai...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9H8irEMnf4
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=high+speed+cw+
|
| clarification: CW is a modulation type, on which Morse code is
| encoded using an on/off carrier wave. Much like how Amplitude
| Modulation/AM is a modulation on which voice is encoded by
| changing the amplitude of the carrier wave.
| myth2018 wrote:
| Also worth mentioning the beacons used to assess current
| propagation conditions
| biggieshellz wrote:
| Plenty of use today in amateur radio, especially amongst QRPers
| (low power enthusiasts, signals <= 5 watts). It's easy to build
| transmitters/receivers for, and it's more efficient than, say,
| voice modes like SSB in terms of spectrum usage and how far you
| can get per watt.
| zatarc wrote:
| Aaaands it's broken.
| biggieshellz wrote:
| Wow, so much beeping -- sidetones all over the place. You need
| some way of tuning. Speaking from experience, CW operators love a
| narrow crystal filter to help with selectivity!
| anonymousiam wrote:
| As a licensed ham who had to learn Morse proficiency at 13 wpm 40
| years ago, IMHO the site sucks. I can use a straight key pretty
| well, but most of the symbols I sent were misinterpreted. I tried
| adjusting the parameters to no avail.
| DrownedCabin wrote:
| .... . -.--
| DrownedCabin wrote:
| .- -. -.-- --- -. . / --- -. .-.. .. -. . ..--..
| drdaeman wrote:
| -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.. . .-. .- .---- - .- .-- .-.
| .- .---- - .- .-- .--. ... . -.-
|
| Gosh, I barely remember CW, it's been such a long while...
| Though my callsign should be still registered, I think my dad
| still paid the license renewals for me (even though I moved
| countries some years ago).
| gormandizer wrote:
| [dead]
| DrownedCabin wrote:
| .-- . .-.. .-.. --..-- / .. .----. -- / .... --- .--. .--. .. -.
| .----. / --- ..-. ..-.
| datasert wrote:
| Chat GPT :): The text you provided is Morse code. When
| translated, it reads:
|
| "Hello, I'm hoping off."
| abecode wrote:
| >> .-- . .-.. .-.. --..-- / .. .----. -- / .... --- .--. .--.
| .. -. .----. / --- ..-. ..-.
|
| > Chat GPT :): The text you provided is Morse code. When
| translated, it reads: "Hello, I'm hoping off."
|
| I got "well, I'm hoppin' off"
| Tepix wrote:
| At the moment, it throws 500 errors when you try to transmit
| something
| chromakode wrote:
| A 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 here!
|
| [1] https://chromakode.com/post/checkbox/
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-03-27 23:01 UTC)