High speed Morse telegraphy using a straight key [video] (2011) | Hacker News Reader

High speed Morse telegraphy using a straight key [video] (2011)

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44 pointsraptorraver34 comments

And if you want to hear what morse telegraphy sounds like in 2022, you're in luck because it's still alive and well. Simply tune your shortwave radio to 7.028-7.045 or 14.028-14.045 MHz every Wednesday between 1300-1400z & 1900-2000z, and every Thursday at 0300-0400z & 0700–0800z. Or, try 7.050-7.060 MHz any evening to listen for operators using straight keys.

If you do not have a shortwave radio there are plenty online at http://websdr.org/.

I'm always curious about how long this will continue (e.g. see the recent post on how Gen Z never learned cursive).

I got my ham radio license (since lapsed a long time ago) when I was a kid, back when you still had to pass a Morse code test. I was totally infatuated by it, and remember the excitement of being able to communicate with folks all around the world. I just lost interest with it when the Internet became widespread.

Also, unrelated point, but another reason that what this guy is doing is so impressive is that he is using a straight key. When I was a ham radio operator, pretty much all the ham's I knew used paddle keys, where you press the paddle to the right to get the "dots", and to the left to get the "dashes", but the interrupts are automatically done for you (i.e. holding it to the right gives you "dot dot dot ..." and holding it to the left gives you "dash dash dash ...", and the speed is set with a dial setting on the key), no need to tap. I can't imagine being this fast with a paddle key, let alone a straight key.

The modern replacement seems to be some of the new mesh packet radio systems. Hard to argue with the simplicity/resiliency of the current setup though.

I've been ready to take the HAM test for a while but just keep procrastinating on doing it.

So go do it. It's easy, with the online practice tests [0][2].

A Technician license (the first one) can operate morse code in the old novice bands on 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters [1].

[0] http://www.arrl.org/licensing-education-training

[1] http://www.arrl.org/graphical-frequency-allocations

[2] http://www.arrl.org/On-the-Air-Magazine

I highly recommend HamStudy.org[0] - free online, or a $3.99 iOS/Android app. It keeps track of which questions you keep missing and will drill you on them. I found this approach was fantastic for passing the Technician exam, and also valid for the General, which I took a week or two later. The General license is worthwhile for the extra operating privileges, and not much more difficult than the Technician exam - just more stuff.

The Amateur Extra is much harder to cram for - more complicated questions, and more of them, and in the US, doesn't bring far more operating privileges than the General license. I did it so that I could convert it to a full German license, and it took a lot more studying for understanding than I did for the first two exams. I used "Amateur Radio Extra Class Licensing: For 2020 through 2024 License Examinations"[1] to understand the material, and "Pass Your Amateur Radio Extra Class Test - The Easy Way"[2] for shameless cramming.

Taking the exams online works out really well, as long as you have a room you can get totally clear and don't mind having three random but supportive volunteers watching you.

[0]https://hamstudy.org

[1]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086JC6XRQ

[2]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085BB2XG3

You can do CW entirely in software without learning it. I've been considering trying this out because the lower bands that technicians are permitted to use here in the US are CW and not voice.

Most of the software that decodes CW isn’t that great unless you have a consistent S9 signal and the keying is even (IE, not straight keyed). Once the signal wanders or is even partially in the noise the software will just spit out gibberish but a human would still easily be able to copy it.

Maybe I’ll have to write some better software then

Fldigi seems pretty good at decoding straight keying amateurs from my experience.

That's a fair question. The time slots I called out above are occupied by learners in the CWops academy. The density of transmissions can be so high that the waterfall resemble the opening to the Matrix. But clearly demographics are stacked against this part of the hobby.

There was a bit of a resurgence of CW during the pandemic. I know a few people who took to learning it during that time. Will it continue? I don’t know but there seems to be more CW traffic than SSB some days. So it’s certainly not dying.

I got my license less than a year ago, but there is still an active amateur radio community. I'm apart of a few active amateur radio discords.

Between cw, digital modes, POTA/SOTA, YouTube, and everything that has been written in the last hundred years about radio there is a lot to learn. I joined because I like learning new things and radio has a lot to learn about.

It's very common to build your own low power (5 watts) transmitter and use code. No fancy electronics or computers needed. People do it out in the woods from inside their sleeping bag in the dark.

Edit: [0][1]

[0] http://naqcc.info/

[1] http://www.qrpme.com/

Well, I do radiosport contests, and most stations are sending around 30 WPM, the hot shots are faster of course. But anyway... I look at radiosport the same way that I look at sail boat racing. There is great fun in keeping the old skills alive, and nobody at your local yacht club thinks it is odd to learn a bunch of arcane knots and spend Saturday dashing around in circles. But nobody is suggesting that wooden ships powered by sail is a good way to bring container loads of merch from China. For me Morse contesting is the same — I would use FTP to fetch an ISO from Finland, but code is good humor on a random Saturday contest.

Can you hear CW on an AM radio? I think it would sound like alternative periods of silence and static.

It does, and FM isn't too much different, but then I would be surprised to find a simple AM/FM radio that can tune to bands where you would encounter CW.

Yeah I was wondering about that as well, is this a normal thing for ordinary people to have in some countries?

Shortwave ("world") radios - they're widely available used for under 50 EUR in Germany.

I really have no sense of the speed or accuracy of what he's doing. If we assume he started that page right when the video started it works out to 168 characters per minute. That sounds like a lot; is that good?

(I don't know any Morse code)

The video begins with the last two dits of the H in the group JHLRM ([.--- ..].. .-.. .-. --), near the top right of the second page. At the end, [1:44, 1:46) is the last group on the page, JTULF ([.-]-- - ..- .-.. ..-.). There is a suffix of what seems to be .-.-. -.., which would be "end of message" followed for some reason by a 'D'.

So around 230 characters in 106 seconds, or 130 characters per minute, or 26 WPM. Slightly slower, considering that this is without spaces.

Still no sense of speed or accuracy.

  morse.replaceAll(' ','@').replaceAll('-','daa-do ').replaceAll('.','dado ').replaceAll(' @','. ')

lets you follow along at 0.25 speed with the rising and falling edges heard in the video by reading,

...do dado dado. dado daa-do dado dado. dado daa-do dado. daa-do daa-do. dado daa-do dado. daa-do daa-do dado. dado daa-do dado dado. dado daa-do daa-do daa-do. dado dado daa-do. dado daa-do...

P.S. Radiosport is the original esport.

That's what original Morse telegraphy sounds like. Just clicks, no tone.

Before I read your post, I guessed he was sending around 25 wpm. He sounds very regular, but I can only read tones - never practiced interpreting the clicks.

Edit: Here's a competition between Morse and a texter[0]

[0] https://youtu.be/pRuRE-Bwk1U

> That's what original Morse telegraphy sounds like. Just clicks, no tone.

Very much this. An experienced operator is listening to the rhythm of the clicks (or tones), not the actual tones.

There are a number of web based morse chat groups which use the old-style telegraph clicks, rather than tones.

If you download "Morse News" you can set it for telegraph sounder (clicks) and practice receiving various news feeds.

http://morse-rss-news.sourceforge.net/

Likewise the Morse Keyer program on the same page.

Is 25-26 WPM considered 'high speed' nowadays? I haven't been an active amateur radio guy for over 40 years, but I remember getting the delay league's 30 WPM cert and having to send and receive 20 WPM to get the extra. I also remember going out to work field day with a radio club using my straight key because I was not using CW much and was getting rusty at it. After a day or so of that, I think I was keeping up with most of the operators with keyers and paddles, a little over 30 wpm, I figured. I was acquainted with a professional telegraph operator at that time, and she said that they just cruised at around 50 wpm, and she worked 4 hours of international morse and 4 hours of American morse each day. What was/is the highest speed for the ARRL certificates? I remember hearing lots of signals going way faster than what I was comfortable with, even rare DX stations who were trying to keep up with the pileups.

The two things that surprised me about the video was that the key was not plugged-in, meaning that he could not hear his fist sounding like CW as he was pounding away, and that vertical motion of his key was so large -- I used to set my key to have a very narrow gap with a stiff spring when I wanted to send quickly.

To get clean keying (especially at high speed) you need a fairly large gap, and actively bash the key up and down, as it keeps the contacts clean. Using a narrow gap results in a very scratchy signal with lots of contact bounce..

To put it another way, it's the snap action caused by the momentum in your wrist that gives clean keying. Just tapping the key results in scratchy morse which has no rhythm and is hard to copy.

You must actively lift the knob (with your thumb under the knob) as well as pushing it down.

Morse code, or CW, is very alive and well [1].

[1] https://longislandcwclub.org/

Great demonstration of skill from someone who's used it for thousands of hours. Impressive.

This goes remarkably well with a second browser tab opened to Dick Dale playing Misirlou.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKpsuGMeqHI

The telegraph network was the true origin of the internet.

Absolutely. Circa 1900, the delay from a major event occurring in New Zealand, and newspapers carrying the story in London, could be as little as a few hours. And the 24 hour news cycle was born. The revolution wasn't just for the newspapers, either. Telegraphy meant you could sell your ship's cargo at the destination port before you even arrived! No more prices always two weeks out of date. And so the modern supply chain was born, too. (As I understand it, that economic force, more than anything else, is what really financed the first transatlantic cables.)

I don't think this really follows. A crucial thing about the Third Network (made with the Internet Protocol, but in a parallel universe it could have been X.25) was that it's packet switched. The telegraph network is connection oriented in practice, like the Second Network (the PSTN).

I think you're on the wrong abstraction layer. The telegraph was the physical layer. Messages from telegraphs would be passed to other lines, or even other systems (telephone, mail, etc) if the person meant to be contacted wasn't standing right there.

The telegraph network in the US was built (late 19th century) with relay stations a few hundred miles apart. The relay was an actual electromagnetic relay in the telegraph office that would automatically re-send the incoming signal over the next leg of the network. Along the segments of a few hundred miles, stations along the wire were all hooked up in a sort of party-line arrangement. Presumably, the electromagnetic relays would add some some little delay on key-down and maybe on key-up, perhaps making real high-speed sending and receiving difficult.

When Morse retired, around the 50th anniversary of the telegraph (1894?), somehow the US telegraph network was briefly wired together so that he could send a farewell message to all the telegraph operators across the country listening simultaneously. How that was done, IDK.

The precision of his timing is amazing.

It certainly gives another meaning to the phrase "bit-banging a serial port"!

ah shit, it's not even plugged in.

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