I spent nine years as a naval communicator and am fluent in morse. It's been a few years so I would definitely need a bit of practice to get back up to 12 words a minute on a flashing light.
I can speak three languages and morse was similar to learn. From the first day of training they gave us sheet of paper with the alphabet and the morse translation and told us to memorize a couple of letters. Then they sent us outside to spend hours staring at a flashing lightbulb.
When you recognize a letter your writer (someone with a clipboard standing facing you and away from the light) would write it down, and when you didn't recognize the letter you said "MISS".
The first day was spent saying "MISS... MISS... MISS..." It was extremely frustrating, the same way being immersed in a new language can be. It felt useless... as if I would never get it. Every day we'd spend the morning staring at the light, and little by little we started to get more letters.
Once we mastered it (100%) they would turn up the speed and we'd be back to where we started... "MISS... MISS... ECHO... MIKE... MISS... MISSS..." until we perfected that speed and were moved up again.
It took about three months of daily practice to get up to the military's standard.
I catch myself years later spelling out words in morse in my head.
I love anecdotes like this. Were you taught Morse purely visually, with the flashing bulb? Do you find it easier to watch a bulb or to listen to a tone?
It was always visual. It seemed useless at the time, spending hours out in the pouring rain on a ship, sending a message with a flashing light to another ship, but they always reminded us that even with all our technology and cryptography, flashing light is still the most secure method of close ship-to-ship communications because it's directional when using focused light.
Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…
Doesn't help - the quadcopter's cameras don't _need_ to be only sensitive to the human-visible spectrum.
(having said that, Rayleigh scattering is frequency dependant, if I recall my high school physics correctly, IR will scatter lees than visible light – I doubt thst matter though, in ship-to-ship communication there'd be more than enough mist/water in the air to scatter enough IR for a suitable camera to see the beam)
That's actually pretty great. I always loved "going back to basics", and flashing a light to talk to another naval ship is as basic as you can get. It works, it's robust in all but the worst conditions, and it's easy. Love it!
More than a language, Morse is a script (or whatever is the generalisation of "script" to other transport layers than the written page), isn't it? The fact that you experienced learning Morse similar to learning a new language is rather surprising. For example, I would expect that you can transliterate random Morse into ASCII, perhaps at a lower bitrate, and, if so, the role of understanding the meaning of the content would be far less important than when learning a new language.
Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light.
When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.
I think* that for those of us that don't have any language learning disability, or "glyph" learning disability -- all symbolic communication is best understood as flow of words/phrases, not symbols -- at least when you're talking about fluency/proficiency/literacy. I believe that's simply how our brains work.
Yes, spoken language is technically built out of phonemes (sounds that we can distinguish, and which carry meaning) -- but there aren't "universal" phonemes (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages).
But the "stops" that allows us to "hear" the phonemes, and even the "stops" between words -- are in fact almost non-existent. This is one reason why we often feel native speakers of a language we've yet to master, speak "too quickly". Our brains are unable to recognize the patterns (words and phrases) from the stream of sounds.
I thnik there's a storng parallel there to how we raed word-picurtes, and not wrods. (Read that line again, slowly).
It makes sense to me that to be "literate" in morse, you'd have to stop looking at the letters, and start looking for the words. Sounds like a great way to learn morse code (and there might be a lesson there about flashcards for foreign languages as well...).
> (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages)
As someone who watched a fair amount of anime with Japanese audio and has some very basic linguistic training, I want to comment on this idea. It's not totally clear what you mean by "two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese", so you get some non-orthogonal untargeted thoughts.
The R and L sounds are in fact closely related. That said, you, as a native speaker of a language distinguishing them, will do so with extreme accuracy.
A possible interpretation of your sentence is that the "sounds are almost identical [...] in Japanese". That's not a particularly coherent idea (and I stress I'm not trying to attribute it to you); a Japanese speaker will hear them as the same sound, but may vary (in terms of what you would hear) from one extreme to the other in what sound they produce when they need that "one".
If you listen to spoken Japanese (it will help to have a transcript of what's being said, since I assume you don't actually know Japanese), you'll notice that sometimes their R/L is more R-like and sometimes it's a definite L. There are all kinds of reasons why this might be the case (most obviously regional accent or phonetic context), but it's also possible that there's just free variation (a la either/either). I have no idea what's the actual reason is. It isn't possible for me, as an English speaker, to process those as the same sound (although prolonged exposure to Japanese might eventually do it; I've become much more comfortable with losing the s/sh distinction as a side effect of exposure to chinese speakers)
The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds.
The same way that you might write A or a or even α to write the letter we pronounce as "aye", a Japanese speaker might choose to pronounce [r] or [l].
A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/. The same way that an English speaker might SWEAR they say writer and rider differently until you record them and they have no clue which one they said when.
> A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/.
There's an interesting phenomenon here. As previously mentioned, my mind has partially assimilated to losing the s/sh distinction. I had a chinese tutor who merged those two sounds, and it stopped bothering me. The same tutor also merged n/l and r/y. I didn't assimilate to those; hearing n where the word I knew used l confused me every single time.
What's relevant is that she didn't merge n/l in her english (which was not fluent). That suggests to me that she might have been able retrospectively to identify which she had just used for a mandarin word like 能 (neng). I agree that that depends on having been trained to recognize the distinction, although I find it slightly odd that she wasn't trained to make it in Mandarin. But, grand summary, I suspect a Japanese speaker could be trained to recognize the distinction even in Japanese.
More generally, I don't think the phenomenon of not distinguishing two different sounds (your Japanese speaker) is the same as the phenomenon of fantasizing that you're distinguishing two identical sounds (your english speaker).
> The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds.
I know that "a" and "A" are the same letter, but I'm easily capable of distinguishing them on demand. In fact, I'm likely to get upset when one is used where I think the other should be. I don't think that mirrors the r/l situation in Japanese. Similarly, I don't vary freely between A and a (and, owing to personal aesthetics, never write α unless I have to write cursive); I follow a fairly clear set of rules that determines one or the other. I know that situation does not reflect the r/l situation in Japanese, although I don't know that it doesn't reflect the situation of any given speaker.
Given a hypothetical Japanese speaker who's capable of producing r and l allophones, if you asked them to repeat a sentence including "are" realized as "ale", down to mimicking the accent, how likely do you think they would be to mimic that realization of [l]?
Of course it is possible, but it is quite difficult. It is easier for children, and generally gets harder with age.
But it also holds true that it gets easier to learn new languages, if you do it a lot. I've heard a lot of people say that it gets easier after the fifth language. I'm only up to four (Norwegian, English, Japanese and French - with a basic understanding of other European "dialects" - German, Spanish, Italian -- and of course "Scandinavian dialects" of Swedish and Danish) -- and I can imagine that if I learned one more "truly distinctive" language, like Finnish, or Mandarin -- I'd start to know more of the "possible ways" we use sounds -- and it would therefore be easier to choose "the right subset" for a new language.
In addition to mimicking accents, singing can be a very useful way to train pronunciation.
>It isn't possible for me, as an English speaker, to process those as the same sound (although prolonged exposure to Japanese might eventually do it; I've become much more comfortable with losing the s/sh distinction as a side effect of exposure to chinese speakers
I can confirm that it happens: if I've been listening to Japanese for a few hours I find myself struggling to distinguish the first few r/ls I hear in English. Even more bizarrely, I've noticed my speech drifting, vocalising an intermediate sound when I'm saying an English world with an l or r in. Strange how the mind works.
I've spent a year in a host-family in Fukuoka in high-school as an exchange student, so I do in fact speak rather fluent Japanese. And I took most of an introduction course in phonetics (and about a year of Japanese) at university (the Japanese course was very basic though).
You do indeed describe the thing I was getting at: the phonemes (sounds that carry meaning) are different in eg: English and Japanese -- but the sounds are (often) there -- they just sound the same to a person that isn't "used to" distinguish between them. I seem to recall there are some now (almost extinct) dialects in Japan that used to distinguish between "ji"(ざ) and "ji"(じ).
The reduction in phonemes is common in all languages, in Norwegian the current struggle is against kids that pronounce "kj" and "s(k)j" sounds the same ("kjenne"=to feel, "skjenne"=to shout (at)).
Teaching exchange students that come Norway some basic Norwegian is also interesting: Many Asians struggle with r/l and v/b (complicated by the fact that most Norwegians believe r and l are "completely different" sounds; when they are in fact very close, and are articulated very closely - similarly with "b" and "v"). Most English speakers have a hard time pronouncing a long Norwegian "ø" -- even if it sounds approximately like the "oe" in "does" -- and they can distinguish perfectly between "He does", and "the does (female deer)...".
I didn't mean word-images in the sense that we don't look at the whole word, I meant that we read the word "as one" (not letter by letter, sound by sound).
Clearly I didn't do a very good job of getting either of points across ... :-)
Moreover, there are "accents." Some people's morse is very distinctive in terms of how they space the characters of some letters or the inter-letter spacing in some words.
My experience with Morse over flashing light was limited to Merchant Marine training, but before that I was a ham and spent lots of time listening to Morse code (CW) on radio. Patterns emerge and you start hearing common words more easily than their individual letters especially once you get above 15 wpm or so.
Even though after all this time I can barely remember actual letters to dot-dash conversions, I can immediately pick up the pattern of "CQ CQ CQ de XXX" (XXX is sending a request to converse out to anyone listening) and other common idioms.
I've been licensed as a ham radio operator since I was a kid (had an odd, early fascination with radio) and recently got back into it a few years ago.
I find using morse code extremely relaxing b/c it taxes your perceptual system in a way that is fairly uncommon in today's world. Either b/c it is being sent very fast or b/c of a weak signal and ionospheric noise, it's a "full brain" immersion exercise that leaves me feeling relaxed and contented (yes I know it sounds a bit odd).
I recommend it highly. Even for those not interested in radio, there are competitions for high speed morse (it's big in eastern Europe)... check out some of the training software:
>> This brings me to my fascination with Morse code. Granted, learning Morse code today may be a futile exercise. After all, I don’t know a single person who speaks it!
From what I understand, ham radio operators still use morse code, although they phased out the requirement to be proficient in Morse code somewhat recently. So I don't think it is completely futile to learn.
"Demonstrating a proficiency in Morse code was for many years a requirement to obtain an amateur license to transmit on frequencies below 30 MHz. Following changes in international regulations in 2003, countries are no longer required to demand proficiency.The United States Federal Communications Commission, for example, phased out this requirement for all license classes on February 23, 2007."
Ham radio operators also perform duties in emergency situations, including disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
"More than a thousand ham operators from all over the U.S. converged on the Gulf Coast in an effort to provide emergency communications assistance. Subsequent Congressional hearings highlighted the Amateur Radio response as one of the few examples of what went right in the disaster relief effort."
You're 100% correct. There is definitely an amateur radio community out there, and many of them are fluent in Morse. I guess I was just trying to say that nobody in my "natural" social circles knows Morse. But if I start hanging out with the right types of people, I'm sure I could communicate in dahs and dits all day!
If you think Morse code is cool, and it is, what is say is cooler, in my very humble and probably worthless opinion is this; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu,The Inca, over 500 years ago, encoded information in binary format using knots on a rope. Think about that. Cool, I think. What do you think?
Morse code, (CW), is a semi-valuable skill for radio operators, especially hams that do HF and weak signal work. It takes experience, but at a certain point the letters become words and the words become phases. It's no longer a requirement for a amateur radio license, but it's still used and useful. (If you want to learn, I suggest the Koch method.)
With the advance of radio technology, especially computers, DSP and SDR, digital modes modes other than CW have better performance. You can decode a whole band of signals digital/CW with the combination of a SDR receiver and software on a decently powered computer.
But the advantage of CW is that you can use really "primitive" inexpensive radios as transmitters and flexible humans as encoders/decoders.
And as a teenager with almost no money this was important to me. I built the classic "Tuna-tin Two" transmitter from the schematic I found in the high school library and most of my money went to buying the $15 brass and plastic transmitter key from some (probably long defunct) store in downtown Brooklyn, NY.
There was a period of maybe the 1980s-2000 where radio was dying (it was all old people who were defending their turf), but in the past 13 years it seems to have really turned around -- more activity on the 2m/440 HT scene, disaster stuff, etc. You can do crazy things like run 1500W wifi. Operate RC. Work space stations (satellites, the ISS, etc.) Weird propagation stuff (sunspot related, meteors, the moon...).
The only lingering problem I have with amateur radio is the ban on crypto, but you can get around that by developing encrypted protocols but publishing the keys in routine use, or moving the equipment to non-ham bands with secret keys later.
VHF (2m) is going to be vastly more useful for emergency communications than HF in most urban areas, and for people who live in apartment buildings, etc., VHF is going to be a lot easier to actually use. I'm using a Yaesu 8800 mobile in my car now so I can cross-band repeat UHF to VHF as well, which would probably work pretty well for disaster communications.
(I'm personally most interested in UHF/EHF, myself, mainly satellite and point to point. I ran an iDirect TCP/IP Ku-band commercial/government/military network for a few years, and would love to buy some space segment on Ka band or possibly X and get back into it at some point. But I don't have a home/office with space for a dish farm right now, nor the $1-5k/MHz to lease transponders.)
If I had the ability to put up a tower or even a patio for antennas, I'd probably get a home HF station, true.
google for "hf mobile" or just ask at a nearby club meeting, there's enough people doing HF mobile that surely someone will give you a demonstration.
I have a "trailer hitch mount". So I can install or remove whatever I want, relatively easily and quickly. Its a slight step up from the magnet mount technique. Using the quick disconnect on the antenna I can stick a 5/8th wave 2M vertical on if I want, or a shortened 20M hamstick-alike, or whatever I want.
My favorite part is my neighborhood has enough RF smog to make HF operation basically impossible (even weak signal 6M sometimes), but a RF silent park parking lot is only a short drive away. This tends to make up for the inherent disadvantages of a small mobile HF installation.
You don't need to start with a $500 all weather autotuner or $700 screwdriver antenna and elaborate mounting plans... a simple $20 stick-type on a temporary magnet is good enough to see what its like, or basically "free" if a local will loan you some gear to see what its like (weaksignal VHF+ rovers are like that, but some HFers are like that too).
Also its a lot harder and more expensive to build an installation that will survive snow and thunderstorms at 85 MPH down the interstate and survive for years outside 24x365 than to park somewhere and slap a magnet mount on the roof and run the cable thru an open window... you'd never drive around like that, but you don't have to, so .. don't. It also cures the ignition noise puzzle... shutting off the engine in a parking lot tends to eliminate ignition noise pretty effectively LOL. Only operating while parked tends to eliminate the "distracted driving" problem too.
Like all things in ham radio, if motivated and knowledgeable you can do quite a bit quickly for free, or you can spend years and thousands if you want. Both are fun.
I found this all very entertaining when I was living in the apartment building.
The other advice I have is keep everything in a big plastic bin, so you don't forget the radio 12 volt power cable at home, or forget your logbook, or whatever else you need. And when you come home, throw the full bin in a corner of the apartment until next time.
Learning process and test, if you're smart, can be done in 4h total for Technician. There are lots of programs to do it in 8h, but IMO a tech person should be able to do it in less time. I used http://www.baears.com/ to do tech (and then studied for General during the rest breaks and got General at the same time!); it's a good choice in the Bay Area.
I should be an Extra and a Volunteer Examiner myself in a month or so, so along with 2 friends with Extra/VE could run classes. I'm planning to do crypto meetups/keysignings/etc on the Peninsula on the first friday of the month anyway (5-10pm somewhere in MV or PA, probably near Google, nominally a 2600 meeting), so doing ham exams during that would be fine, if people studied before that.
Its "amateur" radio, not to be stolen and taken over by encrypted taxi dispatchers or pay per view encrypted TV broadcasters. The FCC likes to separate human activities by frequency band, and gets all out of whack when people try to sneak around their intentions. In no small part because of licensing procedures and fees which are darn near zilch for ham radio and quite expensive process for some LMR and broadcasting operations.
Its also kind of vital for international communication into repressive regimes (worse than the USA in 2010s anyway). Think of a kid in Wisconsin talking to a dude in Russia during the peak of the cold war, that kind of thing. Now "everybody knows" that you can trivially embed a one time pad, but at least we're not sending character groups containing who knows what to each other. So pretty much everywhere except utterly failed states, you can get an amateur radio license and just kind of hang out on the air. Its the original techie social network, from decades before the internet.
Finally at least in theory its supposed to be one big party line for general purposes and emergency communications. So partitioning the service into little encrypted groups who intentionally would not be able to talk with each other, serves exactly what purpose given the intentional regulatory design to encourage the exact opposite goal? It would be like allowing encrypted messages on Hacker News comments, which would serve exactly what purpose, if any?
There are practical reasons to learn it, if you do radio operations. A morse signal doesn't require the same bandwidth that a voice signal requires, so you're able to focus the power of the transmitter into a tighter bandwidth, and broadcast with more power than a voice signal. In addition, you can understand the information in a morse signal in the presence of much more interference than you can understand a voice signal. So it's actually quite practical when doing radio operations to use morse, even today.
I learned Morse Code as a 12 year old while working towards my ham radio license. It was a challenge, especially getting to 13 WPM. The 20 WPM requirement of the Extra class was the main reason I didn't go for that one at the time.
Even to this day, over two decades later, I can still generate and recall Morse (albeit slowly). This is one reason I urge young people to study something meaningful and lasting while they're still in school. I wish I had an adult who had told me that when I was young. I still know a lot about electronics, RF, antenna design, etc. but I wish I had internalized mathematics fundamentals or a foreign language instead. I still believe that one reason Richard Feynman was so facile with physics and mathematics was because of the notebooks he and his friend kept while they were kids.
Cool article! "Code" by Charles Petzold[0] talks about morse code while covering ways that we encode data. May be a good read for anyone interested in this topic.
I learned Morse Code as a Girl Scout and became fluent for the intellectual challenge. I'm definitely no longer fluent but could get by in an emergency with a quick refresher.
Like many of the others in the thread, I first learned CW in order to upgrade my ham license (I started as a "No-Code Tech" and wanted HF privileges, which required passing a Morse Code exam).
> As you develop proficiency in receiving–or “copying”–Morse, you start hearing the characters rather than the dashes and dots.
I was attempting to explain this to someone else a long time ago and they had trouble really understanding what I meant until I described it another way -- think about how toddlers first learn to read. They initially begin by learning each individual letter, then how a couple letters in a specific order make a specific sound and form different words.
As your reading comprehension increases, you no longer read letter by letter. Instead, your brain recognizes a sequence of letters as words. As you are reading this post, you are reading words, not the individuals letter that compose them.
When trying to increase the speed at which you can "copy" Morse Code (which is done simply by reducing the space (time) between characters), you stop hearing the dits and dahs and instead learn to recognize individual letters. After a while, you'll even begin to recognize (some) words just by their sound.
Past the age of 17 or 18, I've never "used" Morse Code for anything practical but it is still stuck in my brain and I can still "copy". At least I know that if I were to ever become paralyzed and unable to speak or move my appendages, I could at least still communicate with others (by "blinking" the dits and dahs).
I got an early start in morse code thanks to my grandfather, who was a Navy radioman in World War II and later became a ham operator.
Sadly I never got my ham license, but it was my grandfather's obsession with radio which got me into electronics and, ultimately, software engineering. I still practice coding now and then, and morse is my go-to "hello world" for playing with new microcontrollers:
It's too bad we don't teach this as part of language development at the primary school level. As someone who's tried to teach programming to lay persons, I can't help but think that having first-hand practical knowledge of how language can be encoded in a kind-of-binary (quinary, according to Wikipedia) system would be an extremely useful abstract concept to have in mind.
I have learnt it, a bit, for amateur radio, where it is still used. There are lots of wee applications for it too, like showing status messages on a small electronic device using a single LED.
There have been times I have wished more people know it, for example for communicating with light accross a mountain valley, or communicating underwater.
In amateur radio, the characteristics of someone's CW (morse code) is called their "fist". I used to be able to do 5 WPM and one year I participated in field day (the annual ham competition to contact as many people as you can, etc) with it -- that year was magical because I used morse code for my first time to talk to someone. The feeling of dits and dahs coming across the airwaves actually being communication from somewhere far away? It was brilliant.
So: kudos for learning an aging and mostly deprecated form of communication. Some folks still do it for hobby (I've lost all skill by this point), and I highly recommend the experience.
If nothing else, find a local ham group and go poke around in late June and see if they're doing anything for field day. It's worth checking out.
I'm not sure if deprecated is the right word. When the zombie invasion comes, I do not feel confident in my ability to get the cellular network back up running. I could easily build a spark gap transmitter though, using spare parts that can be found anywhere and high-school level electrical engineering. In seriousness, it seems somehow foolish to deprecate an extremely reliable, cheap and time-tested form of communication. That said, I never got far in my own attempts to learn Morse code :-)
If any of you are already fluent in Morse, I'd love to hear from you! Were you able to hear full words or phrases "natively"? Did you ever have the experience of being able to identify the person on the other end merely by accent?
Other great answers here -- I'll add my $.02, well, just because.
Ham here as well (K2KD). I had most of my experiences as a kid (6th - 8th grade), had an HF rig in my bedroom, and made my way through Extra class (which, I think, required a 20 WPM morse test).
I'd liken hearing common CW phrases not so much as hearing "the phrase" in its entirety / natively, but more akin to listening to a song or tune you're familiar with. Your brain knows what the next word / note is going to be, so that's queued up in your head (and why you can hum along with a tune you know).
Same with morse code -- you'll start to hear a familiar pattern and you'll just know how it's going to continue. Things like "CQ" were VERY common to hear and you always knew that pattern (-.-. --.-). Or signing off, you knew when someone was starting to say 73 (--... ...--) so you'd end up "singing along" with the words to the song you knew (metaphorically-speaking).
I was quite experienced with it and even now, 20 years later, I still know the alphabet. But I'd never say I got to true language-less fluency -- the code always translated into letters for me (either written or in my head), except in the cases above (I can hear a CQ now and not think "CQ" but instead hear it as the universal beacon call...da dit da dit..da da dit da......da dit da dit..da da dit da...)
First I want to answer one of your other questions -- could a skilled Morse operator identify a person by his sending style, what we called his "fist". The answer is yes, absolutely. But there's more to it than that -- each CW (continuous wave) transmitter had different characteristics, in the days when most of them were built by their operators -- some of them changed frequency slightly during each dash, some of them had noticeable clicks caused by too fast a transmitter activation and deactivation around each Morse element -- these helped one identify a specific operator along with his personal sending style.
A few years ago, about the time that the FCC abandoned the code sending/receiving requirement, I assumed that CW was dead. But lately, listening to the ham bands, I see there's a surprising amount of CW activity still present.
> Were you able to hear full words or phrases "natively"?
Over time one begins to hear entire words, especially at high sending rates. This is especially true for common words, words that are part of every contact ... example "Name is (name)": "-. .- -- . .. ... .--. .- ..- .-.."
As this example MP3 shows, in modern times we can avoid the quirks of manual keying by letting a computer create perfectly shaped Morse characters for us. :)
I encourage any hacker to take a look some time at the beautiful 'bugs' still (!) made by Vibroplex [1].
I have wanted to learn Morse ever since I read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [2]. I know people use keyboards nowadays---and even software to read Morse and translate it automatically into text---but I want to learn to send it by hand. Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? (I just love the look of those beautiful machines with tiny pendulums and jewelled bearings and neodymium magnet 'springs'...). I also wonder about electronic keyers with paddles. What works best for a beginner who wants to develop a good 'fist'?
> Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with?
I'm biased because (before the computer era) I never used anything but a straight key. I recommend a normal telegraph key for beginners -- they're easier to control and they produce an appreciation for the simplest possible form of radio and wired communication:
-- is of a real antique, but one still available today. Unchanged, it dates back to the land telegraph era, during which one operator, when finished sending, would throw the switch visible at the top center, thus closing his end of the circuit and allowing the other end to reply, in what was a simple two-wire one-battery telegraph circuit.
Interestingly, in 1859, there was a huge solar and geomagnetic storm, much bigger than anything that has happened since, and one of the few contemporary indications was that the telegraph system went crazy:
A quote: "Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies."
It is estimated that, were such a storm to occur today, it would bring modern electronics -- and society -- to its knees.
> What works best for a beginner who wants to develop a good 'fist'?
Well, one, listening to good sending certainly helps. Also not trying to send too quickly at first, and listening more than sending until one acquires a sense of what good telegraphy sounds like.
I agree with your remarks and extend them such that bugs and keyers usually are not built to operate slowly enough for folks starting out to use them.
Start with the straight key, and at some point you'll be able to hear faster than you can comfortably send for long periods, and start wondering what technology would allow you to send quicker... that's the time to start looking at bugs and paddles and electronic keyers and memory keyers and morse keyboards and all that kind of stuff.
Maybe bad analogy time is learn to type on a classic traditional keyboard (model M?), then start looking at the infinite array of ergonomic keyboards.
Thank you! I'll begin with a traditional key, and listening.
My keyboard is an IBM Model F [1] through an interface from Hasgstrom Electronics. It has the Control key and Escape key in the old places, essential for vi.
There was a time when you could identify the entire country of Cuba by the "accent" of their CW signals. For whatever reason, probably the popularity of certain homebrew gear designs there, most Cuban CW signals had a characteristic "chirp" due to the frequency shifting a little at the start of each dot and dash. That, and sometimes their average frequency would drift up or down the band, and you'd have to chase them around.
I had a lot of fun with radios as a kid (15--20 years ago). It was so magical to talk all across the world from your bedroom. Then this whole Internet thing happened. ;)
As a ham operator, there are standard phases and exchanges that make contacts easier. (Especially in a contest.) After time it becomes second nature. In "normal" or "ragchews" exchanges with older hams, you may have to brush up on medical and anatomic words and phases.
I learned morse at age 11 when I first got interested in ham radio. It took a couple of months of frequent use before it really felt natural, and this was probably about when I started perceiving words rather than characters.
when i used to walk an hour to work (and another back), i considered using morse as an interface to a portable computer (for editing and playback of text). it's easy to hear and understand, even when there's considerable ambient noise, and data entry would only require a single button (plus perhaps a rocker switch or similar to scan through existing data).
at the time i had no real idea how to implement it. now i think i could do something with an arduino or similar. but thankfully i now work from home...
I've also thought about a pocket-sized clicker device that you could use to send Morse to your friends, perhaps interfaced with your phone. Or maybe, as you said, you could use it as an input device. One day when I have some extra time on my hands I'm sure I'll sketch one out. But I've got to learn Morse first! ;)
I tried learning in middle school and just memorizing all the letters was a pain. At that age it's just not that exciting, at least for me it wasn't. I can totally appreciate the value of it now, the ability to send messages around the world with just an antenna. My wave is bigger than yours, or something like that, LOL.
well, if i knew morse code, i could drive and text easily. or type an email in the middle of a meeting without anyone noticing. looks like a good skill. considering learning it.
I can speak three languages and morse was similar to learn. From the first day of training they gave us sheet of paper with the alphabet and the morse translation and told us to memorize a couple of letters. Then they sent us outside to spend hours staring at a flashing lightbulb.
When you recognize a letter your writer (someone with a clipboard standing facing you and away from the light) would write it down, and when you didn't recognize the letter you said "MISS".
The first day was spent saying "MISS... MISS... MISS..." It was extremely frustrating, the same way being immersed in a new language can be. It felt useless... as if I would never get it. Every day we'd spend the morning staring at the light, and little by little we started to get more letters.
Once we mastered it (100%) they would turn up the speed and we'd be back to where we started... "MISS... MISS... ECHO... MIKE... MISS... MISSS..." until we perfected that speed and were moved up again.
It took about three months of daily practice to get up to the military's standard.
I catch myself years later spelling out words in morse in my head.