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Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

Morse code has some interesting properties that make it an ideal way to communicate when all else fails:

1. It can be transmitted by simple means through many mediums - radio waves (amateur radio, as in the article), light (turning a light on and off), sound (I once used a boat horn to communicate with another boat)... technically I could even tap it on someone's shoulder.

2. It's self-clocking; you don't need a way to synchronize between two operators. One of the amateur radio clubs within range of me, K1USN (https://www.k1usn.com/sst) runs a contest that's limited to 20wpm so that new operators can get used to interpreting Morse on the fly.

3. It's fairly easy to recover after a fault - much easier than, say, ASCII. I might lose a few characters, but much like a smudge on a written page, I can figure out where intelligible letters start again without much difficulty.

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HAM was a nice rabbit hole to fall into, but unfortunately I couldn't muster enough interest to actually get good enough to go "on air".

Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:

Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.

On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)

One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)

People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.

One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)

> Learning Morse code is like learning a new language.

It is not. Cat is still spelled cat.

I passed my 20 wpm morse code license 30+ years ago, and when I hear code to this day, it sounds just as natural as someone spelling cat as "See Aye Tee".

You denied, then agreed :)

Morse code is not a new language, but it is a new way of writing, which is almost the same as a new language in many ways.

You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. Hey uh, you want a drink?

I just spent the past five years learning Morse code, and for me it was significantly more difficult than learning a foreign language. Perhaps I'm just getting old and my brain isn't as pliable as it used to be, but it's been a very long and difficult journey. Here is what I've learned:

- You can memorize the letters and decode up to around 20 WPM. But this is using the low-bandwidth, logical part of the brain which simply isn't capable of decoding much beyond 20 WPM.

- To go beyond 20WPM you have to hand-off the processing to the subconscious mind. This is the phase that's equivalent to learning a new language. It requires a tremendous amount of repetition to build the mental muscle memory to hear the letters as a single sound instead of a series of beeps. It literally took years of daily practice to get there.

- Once you've mastered the individual letters you eventually start hearing combinations of letters as unique sounds. And at some point, you start to hear entire words, not letters.

- If I attempt to perceive individual letters at higher speeds I almost always end up missing the rest of the word. At these speeds, the conscious, logical brain becomes a liability that must be to be surpressed to decode effectively. As a 30 year software developer, this has been VERY difficult to do.

- When I get into the flow, I don't "think" about the letters or "hear" a series of beeps. The words somehow just magically pop into my mind.

I don't remember this much pain, but I was about 10 years old when I learned. On the other hand I've been learning guitar late in life and am wondering how much easier that would be if my brain had seen a few less orbits.

That isn’t what the person to whom you’re responding is saying.

Morse code is very much like a language in that there are audible intonations that differentiate between See, Aye and Tee. Being able to copy that in your head is the same as listening to English and not needing to reach for the dictionary every other word.

I learned Morse code almost 50 years ago. I distinctly remember how learning progressed through stages

- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A

- hear di-dah, think "A"

- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"

- add more and more words

Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word

For what it's worth, Morse doesn't actually work via tapping (unless you add scraping as the dash component). Tapping makes no distinction between dots and dashes; what you intend as a dash is technically a dot and a pause.

There's a parallel code specifically for tapping, called "Tap Code" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code

I've told my family that if I'm ever in a hospital bed due and seemingly unresponsive due to injury or illness, to check whether I'm not trying to communicate (using eye movements, finger twitches, or whatever) in morse code.

Not sure if you're familiar with this or not, but that concept appears as part of the story in the novel[1] and movie[2] "Johnny Got His Gun". The premise is based on a badly injured soldier during WWI who has lost his ability to speak, see, hear, etc. He communicates by banging his head on his pillow in Morse Code. Many scenes from that movie are interspersed throughout the video to the song "One"[3] by Metallica.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_(film)

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw

Wrote a memoir by blinking at the right time going through the alphabet ordered by frequency

Adding onto your point #1, you can tap it through rock - which has helped people who are trapped in caves communicate & get rescued!

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