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Comment by arjvik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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