Morse sounds like a useful thing, really. There aren't many digital encodings that can be done by hand and still remain readable in high-noise conditions.
The hobby already struggles with gatekeeping/driving off people who don't "ham right" and so making the hobby more accessible is a big positive in my book.
As long as you are Part 97 compliant, what exactly is your problem?
I mean the most basic CQ is dah dit dah dit - dah dah dit dah. You don't heard the dots or the dashes, you hear the rhythm. You don't see the CQ either, you know the concept from the rhythm as part of the conversation.
Btw, original American Morse had extra symbols!
I would understand perhaps semaphore because anyone can wave their arms about and communicate long distances.
But since radio requires equipment anyway, you might as well use modern digital equipment - with the benefit that in the same amount of time, power and bandwidth that a morse signal would use, you can send 10,000x more data.
Morse is the ultimate narrowband mode. The cleaner your oscillator and the narrower your output the better. On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator.
The only comparable digital mode is on-off keying which is used by cheap, low data rate devices. Even 'narrow' digital modes are wideband compared to morse code.
"On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator". Completely wrong, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding.
Morse is a wonderful mode, but suffers from the lack of error correction which had made modes like PSK31 and FT8 so much more effective, especially in bandwidth usage.
Clrly yu hve never usd this on the bands.
Yes, the error correction is between the operator ears. It is not a mode that can easily automated.
CW is wonderful, but is has long since been superseded by more modern digital modes.
You can easily use a transmitter with Gaussian keying to reduce the sidebands to zero.
The sidebands in CW ARE the information. If there were no sidebands, there would be no information.
> When the key is down there is no modulation whatsoever.
No, but you can't keep the key down forever. The information is in the transition from Key-down to Key-up (and Vice/versa). Which is why the modulation envelope (eg bandwidth) has to be tailored to the keying speed.
> You can easily use a transmitter with Gaussian keying to reduce the sidebands to zero.
Gausian keying requires a Raised-Cosine envelope. It is this which contains the sidebands and the information, and causes the B/W to be widened.
https://www.w8ji.com/cw_bandwidth_described.htm
and see "An Improved Audio-Frequency Bandpass Filter for Morse Code Reception" by James L. Tonne, W4ENE"
http://www.tonnesoftware.com/downloads/CWBPF-As-Submitted-To...