Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to learn Morse, but I'm concerned that my skills would quickly atrophy if I stopped practicing.

You probably already know this, but for the information for anyone else interested in becoming a Ham, you don't need to learn Morse to get an amateur radio license - that requirement was dropped in 2007.

In all of the disaster drills or other ham volunteer events I've participated in (like providing radio support for a race in an area with little cell phone coverage), Morse was not even a part of it -- it was all VHF/UHF voice communication.

That's not to say that morse is useless or completely unused, but don't feel that you have to learn it to become a ham.

Also there are morse modem apps you can get on the smartphone and just put it next to your radio. It's a non-issue these days.

I think if you are in a situation requiring Morse code, you likely don't have access to a smart phone.

Not true at all. Infrastructure can go down leaving a lot of compute at the nodes. If you can power a radio you can power a smartphone.

I don't really care if it's not a formal requirement. At least I can flex on my friends :)

I think Morse code was dropped in the 1990s.

I got a license without Morse code back then. Never really use it though.

I always thought packet radio might be interesting, but no one in my local group was interested. Did it ever become popular.

Packet radio doesn't allow encryption so its utility for most applications is pretty limited.

Neither does hackernews* (the threads are readable by the public).

*yes, yes, https, username, passwords... i know.. but you write a block of text, post it, and it's shown here... no encryption needed for that.

What did you want to do with packet radio?

That's probably somewhat of a special interest since it requires a smart device.

Packet radio doesn't support encryption to any meaningful specification, and also is intolerably low-bandwidth for any real-world applications outside things like instrument telemetry.

What about communicating during a disaster? ..as in the article?

Amateur radio in general doesn't allow encryption, but that doesn't make it useless, especially for disaster communications.

Use a Morse code email reader :-).

I started implementing an Android "Morse" keyboard widget but gave up realizing how deeply into Android I was going to have to go to make it do what I wanted. My plan was to use the accelorometer to read the finger taps so that I could send texts by tapping my phone while it was upside down on the table next to me.

Gmail Tap gmail.com/mail/help/promos/tap/

Okay, that is just hilarious.

When I was in the ham club at Michigan State knew a student who built a code reader for his Masters. He wrote the code for the university's IBM 360, inputting it with punch cards. My memory is that it worked quite well.

Now you can get one that runs on your cell phone, that's progress!

I've got a Morse code decoder and encoder running on a Rasberry Pi, it both sends the ident for my WSPR beacon and records contacts of other beacons. It does better on non-human encoded Morse which is more consistent than a human but still does pretty well.

Learing is not too hard. It took me about a month of drilling while I was walking to work to learn the letters and digits well enough to do 5 wpm (which basically means that you have memorized them).

Are you interested in keeping them up? Morse on the air can be fun, and a not too expensive hobby.

My experience as well. And one hour on the air each day led to a 5 wpm increase each month for several months.

You may already know this, but for anyone else reading, Morse code is no longer a requirement for any amateur license in the US. (I don't know about other countries.)

It still can be a useful skill - and fun when you get into it - but there is a lot you can do in ham radio without Morse.

Is there such a thing as a straight key or paddle (iambic?) key that connects to a USB interface? The amount of bandwidth required to conduct a CW QSO via the internet would be far less than a VoIP call. A Morse code chat program would make for an interesting Show HN project.

Yes. https://hackaday.com/2017/10/03/a-vintage-morse-key-turned-i... There are others.

Making one to your own spec is actually pretty easy with an Arduino.

https://hamprojects.info/mortty/

I'm learning morse code, and I stream my lessons daily on Youtube [0] and twitch [1] using LCWO [2]. It just takes 10 minutes a day, and if you leave it it's incredibly easy to pick up again, just like riding a bike.

[0] https://youtube.com/c/n0ssc [1] https://twitch.tv/kawfey [2] https://lcwo.net/

Thankfully, there’s lots of practice options, including a number of apps. Here’s the one I’ve used for years now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/morse-it/id284942940

I'm on Android. Morse Mania looks decent.

- install Google keyboard - use the Morse code Tasker plugin to read your messages to you using morse code vibrations

Reply on news.ycombinator.com