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Comment by olliecornelia | Hacker News Reader

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?

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(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.

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