Koch method to learn Morse | Hacker News Reader

Koch method to learn Morse

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212 pointsTomte79 comments

I haven't tried this site, but the most well known for learning Morse in your browser in Ham radio is:

Which uses a similar technique. It also has quite a few more types of practice such as words, callsigns, games, contests etc.

I learnt Morse code there last year before I did a CW academy online course and I really enjoyed the approach.

On iOS there is Morse Machine, similar idea for single characters. There is also morse.camp, a PWA that focuses on recognizing English words.

On iOS, I like the Ham Morse app. It does Koch and Farnsworth, simulates QSOs, and sends news summaries.

Yeah, LCWO is the gold standard for Koch training on the web, and I'd second the suggestion for CW Academy. Having a commitment to learning with other people tends to help you ride out the rough patches.

To help with my own learning, I built a mobile friendly web app/game which includes Koch as an option. It's also open source - https://github.com/mdp/morse.mdp.im - morse.mdp.im

Interesting! I found myself struggling a lot on the linked site because the random groupings made it very easy for me to lose my place and feel like i've gotten behind, but LCWO's fixed groups of 5 help my find my place a lot better.

My father, who is an expert in matters relating to early wireless, was asked by the National Geographic to recreate the SOS message sent by the Titanic. This has historical significance as it was the first time that the SOS was used. In order to make it as authentic as possible, he used an ancient brass Morse code key wired to a spark transmitter. The spark signal was picked up by an old radio he had wired up to a tape recorder.

Caveat: I may have got a few details wrong. It’s been a long time since he shared the story.

Today software like fldigi would decode the signal perfectly.

"It's a CQD, old man!"

CQ is what we use to hail another station ("seek you"). Hams use this all the time to call out to the ether for someone to respond. It's been used since telegraph days and early wireless was no different. BUT, the distress call before SOS was CQD.

That's very difficult to hear if you're trained your brain to filter out all the other ops calling "CQ CQ CQ" all the time. Your brain will hear the incessant CQ every time you tune where other stations are sending Morse. But to hear CQD, your brain must be actively listening and making sense of what's being said - hard to hear when you're not actively listening to the incoming signals. That's one (primary?) driving reason why SOS became the de facto distress signal. It's unmistakable (... --- ...) and not a sequence heard often. It took the responding ships a moment to remember that's what was being called out over the air. "It's a CQD, old man!" was famously recorded from the account of radio operators on responding ships.

("Old man" is a friendly term for one another on the radio. In Morse, we just abbreviate as OM.)

> "It's a CQD, old man!"

Yes, you are perfectly right. My bad.

Was it this recording?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=snkwsU98QlQ

Note that in a ham radio setting, morse code is only part of the equation. The conversations typically follow patterns that aren't very readable, even when transcribed to ASCII.

http://lidscw.org/resources/cq-qso-template

This is because there're different levels: they are similar to EOL, LF and EOF.

From http://lidscw.org/resources/cq-qso-template

> There are three in general use: AR signifies the end of the message, KN marks the end of your transmission and an invitation to the other station to reply, and SK says it’s the end of the contact and your last transmission to that station

See this nice discussion on the nature of morse:

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/39920/is-morse-code-b...

> TLDR: We can thus conclude that the Morse code can be understood, and easily analyzed, as the composition of a prefix binary encoding of a 3 symbols alphabet {dot, dash, sep} into a binary alphabet, and a prefix encoding of a 58 symbol alphabet (57 characters and one space) into the 3 letters alphabet.

> The composition itself is a prefix encoding of the 58 symbols into a binary representation.

Check this part:

> However, some people would be inclined to recognize the space DET at level 2, thus making the alphabet quaternary, then using it directly at level 3, encoded as itself in level 2.

> This would meet the standard definition, for DET encoded in binary as 0000. But it would prevent the analysis of the binary encoding C2→1 as a prefix code, making it harder to show that CMorse is a prefix code, hence unambiguous.

In your link, AR, KN and SK can be considered in a similar way, but applied to the decoded message.

While training for Amateur radio license, I came across interesting things which I hadn't observed before, mainly to do with the ProSigns (like the SOS °°°---°°°)

* There is no word in English dictionary with HH (°°°° °°°°). Hence it's a code to indicate scratch the last word.

* The washing machines & microwaves of many manufacturers often beeped AS (°-°°° i.e. Wait) in Morse when they were done, to indicate machine is "standing by"

> There is no word in English dictionary with HH (°°°° °°°°).

Beachhead

More commonly, "uhh", "ahh", and "ehh" (and their elongations) -- though I imagine their function is either fulfilled in other ways in Morse (prosigns?) or simply not needed.

My reference was towards unconjugated words. GP posted 'beachhead' - which is a colloquially derived American English word by conjugation of two common English words. Normally you don't see conjugated or stretchy words in amateur radio to facilitate esse. So Simple Wikipedia level of vocabulary, having words which are rather unambiguous to all English speakers. Outside of US, I am sure most people will pause to grasp whats a beachhead. Over HF your taps can be heard half way around the globe. Its considered good manners to be clear & concise

'Ahh uhh' etc aren't useful in a mode of telegraph communication which is rather very terse & commonly does not even include is/are/and etc in transmission. Pithy sentences relaying the content matter is encouraged - to speed up typing & also not to block useful airwave. Most HAMs are sharing a narrow set of channels & only one operator pushes-to-'talk' at any given time

So no withhold, fishhook, or hitchhike? How do they handle names like Munchhausen?

By proxy.

Nicknames. Seriously.

I once knew a HAM that went by Gark in Morse because it was faster to key than Gary.

That's totally fair! It sounds like these words simply aren't used in Morse communication, which seems reasonable due to its purpose. I imagine HH as a prosign is also fairly unambiguous in grammatical context, even if someone did need to key it as part of a word.

do you realistically see yourself, or anyone else keying in those ?

Using morse is all about efficient transmission in high noise environments.

Personally, I think I'd be annoyed if i had to decode that whilst sitting on a mountain top, or wherever (not being hyperbolic SOTA[1] and POTA[2] are real things folks participate in).

[1]: Summits On The Air https://www.sota.org.uk/ [2]: Parks on the Air https://parksontheair.com/

I'm not a Morse operator, so I wouldn't know. That's why I said the function of these words may simply not be needed.

The poster earlier claimed that no English word contains the digraph "hh", however, which is simply untrue. It's quite uncommon, and I'm sure the prosign use of HH is grammatically unambiguous in general, but it being invalid otherwise is not a well-founded reason.

> The poster earlier claimed that no English word contains the digraph "hh"

Context, my friend.

If you pick up regular non-colloquial words & unconjugated words, there actually is no word with a double H. I read this trivia in the ARRL handbook. Extremely well written covering everything HAM.

But like others are posting to prove a point in contrary, fishhook beachhead exist - but are either conjugated or colloquial. By that reasoning, every second word in Asian languages such as Vietnamese/Laotian has double H when scripted - but is it to be considered a standard mode of unambiguous communication over international frequency spectrums?

> I read this trivia in the ARRL handbook. Extremely well written covering everything HAM.

> [...] a standard mode of unambiguous communication over international frequency spectrums

That's exactly the context that's missing for most participants in this thread :) Thanks for making it explicit for us! When you lead with "There is no word in English dictionary with HH", it sounds like the context is literally the English dictionary. What you're actually judging against is the practical lexicon of radio operators, which is very different and worthy of investigation independent of the lexicon the rest of us plebians use ;)

>> There is no word in English dictionary with HH (°°°° °°°°).

> Beachhead

Also bathhouse, fishhook, hitchhike, roughhouse, and withhold.

*withhold the last word?

Combination of Koch and Farnsworth is how I've learnt morse code in the last year. Has been a challenge at times, but keeping the speed up makes a huge difference. The struggle I still have is catching words my just listening.

Also worth pointing out CWops https://cwops.org/cw-academy/ and the Long Island Club (it's all online) as a classed based way of learning. CWops is intensive but very effective

The book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, talks about morse in its first chapter.

The beauty of how morse encoding expands out from the binary dots and dashes in to letters and sentences is a lovely thing to read about. Think of it more as a tree graph allowing you to find your ideal letter, branching out from a root of common letters to less common as you fan out.

Brail is mentioned in the second chapter with a similar enlightening description.

Is there a good reason to learn Morse in modern day besides just for kicks? Some sort of survival situation in which your only form of communication would be Morse, and you can't get out of it by sending ASCII binary?

Not knocking on anybody's learning for fun, just curious.

Why rule out a survival situation? While nuclear missiles would probably just end all life, there are a broad spectrum of other things that can go wrong in the next decade that just take out power grids. It would be good to be ready with more robust technology than GPS-aware microchips, I can see how it could come in handy.

I'm seeing a lot of energy security issues out there, and there are extreme economic pressures all over that could spill out in unexpected ways. There are some profoundly grumpy people out there right now.

Sure, but how does knowing Morse help in those scenarios.

listen to long distance news updates and survival tips for you and your loved ones through your wind-up AM radio in morse during nuclear winter.

Generally CW mode (morse) can be transmitted farther on less power than most other modes, and can be sent and recieved without sophisticated electronics (build your own QRP rig for like $10).

But yeah, there's not a lot of utility, even in rare or hypothetical emergencies. Many other things one could focus on.

In apocalypse you'll have a lot of down time to learn Morse.

Interesting. Without grocery stores (et. all) I think most of us will have far less free time.

I would 100% completely rule it out in survival situations. The probability of making a contact and that contact being of use is very low. There are far more productive uses of your time than bashing brass. I say that as a regular QRP CW operator.

In a survival situation you're better off with VHF/UHF HTs and a tested network of people that you already know who have them and how to use them. And even that is of dubious use.

Some infinitely more likely survival situations involve tooting on a horn or blinking a flashlight.

Survival situations are one of those power law distributions where the odds of one person being in a survival situation at some point in their life are surprisingly high, regardless how unlikely it would be for a couple billion people to simultaneously be in the same survival situation.

Initially, I learned it for fun and ham radio emitting. But I find it fascinating that you can use it with anything that can be turned on and off with a rythm.

I used a flashlight to say "hello" while waiting for a fireworks event, but the other person far away just blinked their flashlight randomly in response.

I guess it could be used for worst scenario speech, like blinking eyes for examples if I ever have a terrible accident somehow (has been used by tortured persons, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ256UU8xJ0). When I saw Tuco’s grandpa in Breaking Bad taking so much time to write words with his bell, I just tought about using morse (but with something more elaborate than a bell, because you want to use long and short tones; same problem applies if you want to knock on walls or doors).

Use double tones/knocks if you don't have long.

Then how do you distinguish between "long" and "two shorts"?

Timing, I suppose. A double tone with much less than one dit's worth of spacing would be a dah.

Original Morse telegraph was not done by tones.

The sounder emitted two clicks, subtlety different, for each key down/up event.

So, a dit would be two clicks with a short interval, while a dah would be two clicks with a longer (3x?) interval.

This is a bad idea. You'll make a dah sound like two or three badly timed dits.

Copying morse code by ear is all about the rhythm. You can hear the rhythm just fine with simple knocks or taps.

In the US, you no longer need to learn Morse to get any of the amateur licenses. Most people who are learning it today are doing it just for fun.

Like ham radio itself.

Very fair question, I had the same thinking two years ago. Since then I got interested in amateur radio, and in particular low power, portable operations as well as homebrewing transceivers.

Using only 5W when conditions are right can work from Australia around the planet using a $30 radio and a 20m wire antenna thrown in a tree.

Also, while its definitely possible to homebrew equipment that transmits voice, morse code is much simpler as you are approximately connecting power from an oscillator to a small amplifier (a couple of garden variety transistors works just fine here)

If you are disabled or can only use a finger - you could control your computer or android with the morse keyboard with autocomplete, would work for termux as well. It'd be slow, but it'd work. The problem is, you'd need a knowledgable buddy to set up the system for you... or you can start right now and switch to morse code entry - force yourself within the limit of 20 wpm.

It is more power efficient than voice. You put the same power into roughly 50Hz of bandwidth vs 2.2k for voice, so you can work the world on a modest station. Its also easier to pick out in the noise than voice.

Amateur radio is more than just "have a conversation with a random person". There are contests, challenges where you try and contact some number of states, countries, etc, and events.

One popular event is Parks on the Air where people go to a designated park and set up a temporary station then try and make contacts. It has a sibling event called summits on the Air where you do the same thing on top of a summit. Using CW lets you do that with less gear and in more adverse conditions.

Finally, its a brain workout. If you like the feeling of being " in the zone" then getting into a Morse conversation or participating in a contest is just the ticket.

"Amateur radio is more than just "have a conversation with a random person". There are contests, challenges where you try and contact some number of states, countries, etc, and events."

For me the technical learning and building projects was the most fun (although I never could get that damn ubitx to work well).

It's impressive to see / hear a good operator communicating right in the middle of a pile of noise. When I saw it done, it was with an older tube receiver, warmed up and stable, running a 100Hz crystal filter in tandem with a BFO.

A friend and I used to "tap" out Morse during church. There is a rhythm to it I find difficult to explain, but when one puts a bit of emphasis on the dash, tapping it all out comes through just fine. It's weird. At first it's just tapping, then one groks the other person's flavor of emphasis on the "dash" or "dah" and the characters sort of appear in the mind.

It's useful in any situation where you're trying to make the most efficient use of the power available to you. The classic example is communicating with the other side of the world with minimal power, but it's also useful in any situation where there's a lot of path loss, like when HF propagation conditions to your desired station are terrible or if you're bouncing radio signals off the moon.

There are computer-based digital modes these days that accomplish the same or similar things like FT8 in terms of bandwidth efficiency allowing communication in situations where voice modes would not work. There's still a lot of stations still working in Morse code. If you're chasing DX (long range contacts), it is still very useful.

From a social perspective, using morse code instead of voice modes tends to filter out most of the political and health talk I try to avoid.

Do you listen/read/write in Morse, or use a computer to translate?

I mostly send with a paddle and decode with my ears. I sometimes use keyer memory to play back messages.

In ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ there is a point where the author, who is suffering locked-in syndrome after a stroke, is communicating by having the letters of the alphabet shown to him one at a time, with him choosing by making the one small gesture he is capable of. Morse code could be much more efficient here, and perhaps more efficient than a binary-search version of the alphabet method.

Yes, it is important for solving some of the more challenging bomb disposals in the game "Keep talking and nobody explodes" within the alotted time limit :-)

Also i think Morse is sometimes used in Geocaching riddles and CTFs.

> and you can't get out of it by sending ASCII binary?

It's a minor point, but I doubt you'll find many people who can decode binary ASCII in their head (especially in contexts like tapping), not to mention that you'll need 7/8 bits per char instead of the ~3 Morse code uses.

Enter tap code, most often used by prisoners to communicate between cells. Row and column in a 5x5 table of chars, encoded by series of taps.

I did not know about this code. Just looked it up. Clever.

Does anyone know why C/K are overloaded rather than something like Q/Z?

My wife and I have wanted to learn it for years so we could communicate to each other while holding hands. But who has the time?

I don't know if you'd call it a "good" reason because its a rare skill to have, but for pilots the NDB beacons and VOR beacons usually transmit their ID in morse code, so you're a button press away from being certain you actually tuned in the correct navigation beacon.

Slightly improved situational awareness when navigating is probably more of a method to avoid a survival situation, than to be a survival situation itself.

OT, does anyone know of an app that will decode Morse code that I type in using a single key like the space bar, holding it down long for dah and pressing it quickly for dit? It should figure out the wpm I'm using on its own, like a human would, rather than making me specify it, or at least it should let me select an arbitrary (possibly fractional) wpm rather than offering only a fixed list like 15/20/25.

there is a _lot_ of ham radio software that decodes live morse from live sources where where's no clue what speed it'll be coming in at.

As well as dedicated hardware, to list but two examples:

http://www.morserino.info/

http://wb7fhc.com/m2-cw-decoder.html

The "Morse Expert" App available for Android/iOS does a pretty good job of decoding CW 'in the wild'. It can adapt to different sending speeds and does a decent job with non-ideal character/element spacing.

The decoding algorithm uses some amount of Bayesian probabilities to decide what the proper decoding of the incoming signal is: http://ag1le.blogspot.com/2013/01/towards-bayesian-morse-dec...

Do you have a link for Morse Expert? It sounds like exactly what I want, but I don’t see any exact name matches when I search for it in Apple’s U.S. App Store.

My apologies. It appears Morse Expert is Android only, sorry. I tried to do a quick search on my way out the door earlier and was mistaken.

15 years ago I worked with a guy who was a Navy Veteran. He’d served in Korea. He still knew Morse Code. He confirmed what many are saying here that it’s all about the rhythm.

Once we were asking him about his experience and when he had to go he wrote on the whiteboard. C U N T. I was shocked and embarrassed. He was a professional guy why would he write this word in our workplace? My coworkers and I laughed nervously. He was grinning and said when ships would leave the port you’d message them C U N T in Morse Code. Which stood for "See You Next Trip"

My father, who my entire family suspects is autistic, used to communicate with me at mealtimes using whistled more code. I learned a bit but have forgotten it all now, just as I have forgotten the Spanish that my mother taught me.

A few years ago I tought myself enough in a few days to be able to chat with people on https://morsecode.me/

I've forgotten it almost all now.

I recently got into Morse and was so proud I could send a message via your tool. Thanks!

Wow this is interesting, I probably am going to learn this way. But I've read the Morse code is deprecated and isn't used anywhere IRL anymore. Isn't it?

Ham radio operators still use it, it's just required for licenses in United States anymore.

I believe radiobeacons still use them as part of their identification protocol in aviation as well.

I think you're missing a "not"

You are correct.

Does learning to transcribe morse->letters at this speed mean you can also do letters->morse in a traditional morse keyer?

Generally yes. Sending morse is much easier than receiving it. Once you are comfortable receiving morse at 25wpm for example, the amount of practice needed to send at that speed is pretty minimal.

Somewhat. There's a skill to the timing that needs to be picked up in addition to the patterns you learn when learning to copy. Ideally, you're also practicing sending with some kind of local oscillator or your radio set to monitor mode. One reinforces the other.

Are new letters usually introduced in a particular order?

Yes, though it's not hard and fast. Many sites will teach the Koch method but often with subtly different ordering, and very different from his original ordering. CW Academy teaches based on how frequently you'll hear them on the air. Long Island CW Club has changed to another system.

Most systems these days though focus on learning a couple letters and then progressively adding more on as you improve.

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