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Morse Code Enters The 21st Century
N8TWJ writes "The International Telecommunications Union has decided to bring
Morse Code into the 21st century by adding the loved (or hated?) - at (@) symbol. Lets hope the spammers don't start sniffing 20 meters for da-dit-da-dit-dah-dit..." According to the article, Paul Rinaldo, chief technical officer for the American Radio Relay League, says: "It's a pretty big deal... there certainly hasn't been any change [in Morse Code characters] since before World War II."
Obviously, morse code operators have had ways of getting around using 'at' signs for almost two hundred years, but it's a cool addition, and is as big a deal as they make out.
:-) If any Morse operators here have some good examples, do post!
I find morse code interesting because so many old timers complain about how the Internet makes 'ppl tlk lk this' and say 'nce 2 c u l8r', but that sort of abbreviation has been used in Morse Code for decades! The typical banter you see on IRC or in SMS cellphone text messages is pretty tame compared to what those operators could pump out on the wires
Now I can just plug my relay right into my ISP and just surf the web and get email through Morse code!
Playing ut2003 will be a pain though. Hopefully ut2004 will have a "Morse" input option.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
dot dot dash dash dot dash dash dash dot dash dot dot dot dash dash
What?
What are you looking at? Why can't I make the post in morse code?
I'm just getting into the spirit of things!
--
The last digit of pi is four.
I was going to 'First Post!' in morse but the lameness filter won't let me. Dang now I'll just get modded to hell and back.
--_- -- -_- --- _ A -__- ___ --- _ A _- ___ A -__ -_ -- _ A _-- -_ __ _-
) . Let's hope Slashdot's filter lets me post this.
(Check this link to translate: http://www.translatum.gr/converter/morse-code.htm
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Morse will truly have arrived in the 20th century when you can :) ;) and :)~
-G
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
DOT SLASH PAUSE SLASH (at)
As a side note:
Imagine a convention of morse code users. Everybody brings their own morse code sound producing device...
It would probably sound as some cube farms out there...
According to the article:
:)
The new sign, which will be known as a "commat," consists of the signals for "A" (dot-dash) and "C" (dash-dot-dash-dot), with no space between them.
This means that the @ is: dit-da-da-dit-da-dit so I don't mind the spammers listning for da-dit-da-dit-da-dit
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Well, given how illiterate today's generations of texters and emailers are becoming we can presumably look forward to ship bound soses such as ...
'OMG! U sUnK mY BatT13sH1p U Camp1ng fAg! Plz snd he1p! GG'
I thought the Morse code was declared obsolete a few years ago.
No, the digraph is AC. You did read the article, did you?
Great news for all fans of morse code. This now means that when we send an SOS we can supply an email address to let us know help is on its way!
...-....-.
Ok, make that last 10 or 15 minutes. Honest, there were no comments posted when I first looked.
Wouldn't spelling as a-t it out be shorter/faster?
at = dit dah, dah
@ = dit dah dah dit dah dit
Or does an inter-symbol pause really take as along as 3 symbols?
Just picture the scene, its the middle of a major terrorist attack, the control centres can only communicate via morse code, and suddenly...
Reading from piece of paper "Get The Cheapest Viagra now!"Oh dear, spam hit an all time low.
While it is cool and all that, forget sending your email address as morse code when your ship is in trouble because nobody is listening!.
I thought nobody used Morse anymore, is it still used in shipping? If not where is it used?
Even more robust than UUCP !
Actually yes, but I obviously wasn't paying attention. More coffee needed methinks.
Finally I can start making my IPv6toMorse translator. And all Morse users can become part of our cozy internet community!
I want my karma, and I want it now!
... that refuses to die: MIDI
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Nuff said...
The International Telecommunications Union has decided to bring Morse Code into the 21st century
All those morse code operators who have been unable to find it in this century can now breathe a sigh of relief! Morse code has made it to the 21st century, just four years late.
I'm a codeless tech, you insensitive clod!
I demand those insensitive clods make a new Euro code. It is vital now that I communicate with my stock broker by rapping morse code with my mug on the prison bars. Oh, and they had better reserve a code for the upcoming "Afro" currency too. Ta.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
As some other comments mentioned, it is a combination of AC, not AT. Even so, it is important to mention that combining two letters without a space creates a completely new sounding letter. The new AC will not sound like separate characters A C. If you were to combine the letters A (Dah Dit) and T (Dah), you would actually have the letter K (Dah Di Dah). 73 de Nathaniel
decided to add new symbol to code STOP symbol insanely long STOP and what about backwards compatibility STOP no really STOP please STOP
(lameness filter prevented all caps here)
Does that mean that nowadays the Titanic should have to write to support@whitestarline.com instead of sending CQD or SOS? Hmm... I'd be willing to bet that some spammers would answer with messages like 'Get your extra lifeboats at special prices! hghgxgx'. Damn.
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
Since there is a hypen and a period in Morse, you can send Morse Code over Morse Code.
You know, er, just to be stupid or something.
graspee
The @ symbol you say? Well if you wouldn't mind helping me leaf through the papers in this draw I think you'll find a patent for "Expressing the typographical symbol commonly known as "at," through the method of representing it as a sequence of "dots" and "dashes" and especially through the medium of sound or electricity.
Morse code is an early variable-length data compression stanard (similar to Huffman codes or Shannon-Fano codes). By representing common letters with shorter codes ("E = "," and "T" = "-") and rare letters with longer codes ("Z" = "--.." an "Q" = "--.-"), Morse code manages to encode the 26 letters of the alphabet in 4 bits maximum and much less than 4 bits per letter on average.
Although Morse did use letter frequencies in constructing his code, it is not a truely optimized code, from what I can tell. Numbers are encoded with a cumbersome 5 bits per digit. Also, the transmission time of messages might be further reduced with minor rearrangements of the code to use more dots (short transmission time) in more frequent letters and more dashes (long transmission time) in the less frequent letters.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Morse codes can be quite useful, even today.
There is a Linux kernel patch floating around (IIRC it was in -ac, don't know about mainstream) that adds the output of kernel panics via keyboard LEDs. Nice for early oopses.
Keyer upgrade schems? ;)
Already a non-standard shorthand version I'm sure.
Auto ID grabber will need a retrofit though, like hosing the artistic bird doo off the antennas & wooden owl.
ooooh, and maybe some powered by AX.25 & Morse 2004 admin compliant stickers.
lol
The main character in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon uses his keyboards LEDs to read a set of documents about cryptography. He uses the LEDs to spell out the documents in Morse code and writes some code using his space key as a morse tapper.
;-)
However, looking at the Morse chart he would have a problem writing code and reading mathematical notations with the limitations of the Morse alphabet.
I'd never thought about that before! You're owned Stephenson
A little planning goes a long way...
- thanks to folks like Bruce Perens, who advocate the elimination of CW testing for amateur radio operators (http://www.nocode.org), the new symbol won't become part of any official testing for amateur radio operators... - get ready for 11-meter operations on all the HF bands!
He had a heart attack. I accept that good BBC drama takes time to reach America, but this is no excuse for such a late story
...before the server gets dash-dotted?
from all you whippersnappers. You don't know nuthin'
.
We were talking across the world and making friends with strangers before Al Gore was a twinkle in his father's eye, and we were doing it for free. Not only did we invent 133t speak, we but we refined it
We had to deal with inteference from the neighbor's electronic organ, changing band conditions, sloppy handkeying, line interference, nests on the antennas, having to make our own equipment, the massive russian woodpeckers equipment problems that we had to fix ourselves, and having to log our operations.
And we were grateful
NA7E
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Perhaps the most famous Morse communication is the international distress signal S-O-S. It consists of three dots, three dashes, and three more dots. Surely these days its the international Nokia sound of an incoming S-M-S three small beeps, two long beeps, three small beeps.
Since I am not very familiar on how to code alphabets best, how would you code a say perl script that maps characters to morse characters, while complaining when the character is not found? I thought of using a hash, but since morse code is binary, there might be a much more funny solution. Anyone?
Black holes were created when god tried to divide by zero
There are a number of morse code symbols that don't correspond to graphical letters, digits or interpunctuation; you may say that they are similar to ASCII control characters in denoting things such as "end of message".
Problem is, when you listen to and take down morse code by hand, you need an easy way to indicate those control symbols too. When I had some morse training in the 1970's (voluntary after-school classes), we used "+" to indicate "end of message" (.-.-.) and (surprise) "@" for "end of contact" (...-.-)...
I don't know whether "@" was in common use for that purpose or if it was just my teacher's idea. To me, @ thus meant "end of communication, time to do something else" long before I learned about spam!
...but what is a dot in Morse code? You know - loser@aol[.]com. For that matter, what about things like _ and / or \? How would you know that the username is big.loser and not big_loser @aol.com.
If they're just adding the @ now, what other symbols that are necessary for "communication in the 21 century"?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Of course, interesting it is!
;-)
Morse code - binary, it is!
-- "May the Source be with you!"
This wasn't a very good idea. Just using the word "AT" is faster than the new character, which is an "A" and a "C" run together into one letter. A "T" plus an inter-letter space is shorter than a "C".
Therefore, this new character WAS NOT NECESSARY. The word "AT" can be used and the context will show that the "@" symbol was meant.
73 de N8KH
I have to ask: with so many thousands of glyphs in Chinese, what did they do to utilize telegraph lines when that was the only means for fast long distance communication?
I'm assuming they didn't create a different sequence for each one....
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The first thing I thought of was that they were going to start sending XML down the line.
Imagine that horror:
<message sender="Titanic">
<word>
<char>dot</char>
<char>dot</char>
<char>dot</char>
<char>space</char>
<char>dash</char>
<char>dash</char>
<char>dash</char>
<char>space</char>
<char>dot</char>
<char>dot</char>
<char>dot</char>
</word>
</message>
Thanks,
--
Matt
Audio at http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=16805 29
OOPS!
A is di-dah, not da-dit. So the resulting combination would not be "K" (da-di-dah), but "W" (di-da-dah).
73 de N3SLK Steve
....--...--.-/ u.--.,/ I/ -.-.a-..----.-/ h..-.-./ y---..-.
I can't hear you.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
Since email was one of the first things used on the internet, why would adding the @ symbol bring Morse Code into the 21st century? Wouldn't it just bring it later into the mid 20th century?
Some ham operators wouldn't mind more changes to spice up the language. While Morse code has a period, a question mark, and even a semicolon, it offers no simple way to articulate excitement. "I was hoping they'd add a character for the exclamation point," said Yocanovich....
Which leads me to wonder: how many emoticons can you express in Morse Code? Or do they have their own equivalent already?
> c a t a t a t n t . o r g
c ha nge. Especially in Morse. You were able to read that mashed sentence with only a little extra trouble. Try that in Morse code and it's a total parsing disaster due to the binary symbols and the variable-length sequences that denote letters and symbols.
;-)
>
> where is the 'at'==@ in that letter sequence?
Simple, I and my other fellow HF CW friends have been doing it for years. Per your example:
"c a t a t a n t . o r g"
Itsnotasifyoucruncheverythingtogetherduringanex
Newbies sending Morse can be EXTREMELY difficult to understand because of poor spacing.
Proper morse code has three levels of pauses:
0) Between dits/dahs
1) Longer ones between words.
2) Really long ones while us Old Timers try to remember just what the hell we were talking about.
3 dots, 4 dots, 2 dots, dah
Radio, Radio RAH, RAH,RAH
OK, more like damn rushed slashdot poster.
I had added angle-bracket delimited "word pause"s to that example and the Slashdot plaintext mode ate it. I guess that's what "Review" is for.
Try this again:
"c a t (word pause) a t (word pause) a n t . o r g"
...let Morse Code die, please! What is next? Six-bit Bardot?
if you think about it, all data is effectively delivered through Morse code.
To paraphrase Monty Python "You'll have to explain the logic underlying that conclusion"!
AFAICS, Morse code is a ternary system, whereas most data, these days, tends to be sent in binary.
Using the word "AT" means you have built in spam filtering as opposed to using the actual "@" symbol in your email addresses. You never know when people are listening in, waiting to scoop a few million morse code email addresses. Protect yourselves. Use "AT" in your email addresses, or at least something like, for example:
- dit dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-dit-dit -dah-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah -dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah
dit-dah-dah-dit-dah -dah-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit dit-dah-dit-dah-dah-dit-dah
-dit-dah-dit-dah-dah
This translates to : cmdrtacoREMOVESPAMTRAP@slashSPAMdot.com
If they don't use good solid spamtraps, these Morse code newbies don't know what fresh hell they're in for.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
"There's really no reason to use it anymore," ... Today it's largely the province of ham radio operators
Er, and radio navaids, there are still quite a lot of those around, and quite a lot of aeroplanes flying around listening to them.
"TITS":
- tune
- identify (ie listen for the Morse code bleeps and make sure you've tuned the right navaid)
- test
- um, nobody can remember what the S stands for.
.. and now all they need to do anymore is to add a Windows button.
-el
Rather, it is an audible one. The process of translating combinations of dit and dah to . and - adds an extra step to the process and is one reason why so many people have trouble learning it. When you hear di_dah, you should see an A in your mind, not .-
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
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-- *- -** *   
How many ./ers can read morse code (or decipher) considering we'er all geeks.
It took me a whole afternoon to learn.
That's why we have ANSI trigraphs...
But... I don't think they bothered making sure C was programmable in only morse characters.
Morse A = dit dah Morst T = dah so the two characters transmitted without the character space = dit dah dah... W FWIW W1RG
Guess I'm a little slow on the uptake..
An Experimental Encapsulation of IP Datagrams on Top of ATM (note the date...)
There's the Q-codes that have already been mentioned, and prosigns, but for real message word count reduction look no farther than the ARRL numbered radiogram messages.
Were I on vacation in Florida when a hurrican hit, I could send the message back home that "We are all safe, don't worry. There was only slight damage were we are, and we will be coming home soon." as: ARL ONE ARL FOUR ARL TWO
There is some header information needed by the message passing system (NTS), but the base message goes from 21 words to 6.
K
Sweet! I haven't gotten to that part yet, thanks :)
Vote for global prefs bug
Dammit! It's called an emphora!
Fnord.
I recently wrote a PHP program that hides morse code messages into other sentences. Guess I'll have to update it now. Check it out here: CodeBreak - Hidden Morse Code
Don't dismiss morse code over CW yet; it has its niche where it rules supreme, even today.
I was in Signal Service, and when during the exercises the enemy jammed our radio telephony we switched over to CW, pulled out the key, brought the hammer down and burned through the barriers. When you go CW (carrier wave) you also switch in narrow band reception. And in the HF band (1.5-30 MHz) it is a jungle where you can hide. To jam anyone there you will need to pump out so much RF power you nearly put the air on fire!
Also in time of crisis, like in war, it is very handy to use morse code. Your tranceiver is sized like a packet of sigarettes, you are hard to locate (by DF for instance) and you can reach around the globe on about 10 W radiated power. Try that using voice.
When something old is still with us there is a reason for it. Just like with morse code.
good, some more simbols and I can write my perl scripts in morse
Breaking news from www.telegraph.co.uk:
World Wide Morse Conference in Oxford
By Harold Banfry in Oxford
Filed 19 February 2004
World Wide Morse Consortium begins a week-long meeting today in Oxford. The distinguished but beleagurered coterie of academics from around the world will discuss the apparently dim future of Morse, its public perception, and paths for its future.
One of the most exciting developments planned for Spring 2005 is the roll-out of Morse Unicode, to accommodate the requirements of the international developer community. Each dot ("dit") or dash ("dah") in the previous scheme will be replaced with four dots or dashes.
"This enhancement is long overdue," says Dr. Davit Dannaugh. "Now we can represent any letter uniquely in any language. With the increasing availability of dedicated broadband Morse lines, there will be no practical impediments."
Also in the limelight for the Oxford meeting are Morse cryptography, Morse security, and Voice over Morse.
- rabs
Any spammers who try to advertise on 20 meter cw will no doubt find themselves quickely DFed and shut down for commercial use of amateur radio.
The Indonesian Navy, Army, and Airforce still use it as a major component of their communications - lots of Asian countries still rely on it greatly. Even for super top secret 'encrypted' messages :-) So I'm told...
I learnt morse (Receive only 25 wpm) with the military back in 1988(ish) - an entire 44 weeks of my life, 8 hours a day.. 5 days a week.. Used it for a year after completion of training, and never thought about it until a few weeks ago. (Joint telecommunications school, cabarlah, Australia for anyone who might like to talk old times.)
The odd part is I can manage about 20 wpm with few errors even after a little over a decade break.
I need a tilde, damnit! My unix-hosted web page address has a tilde! There go my hopes of reaching new audiences via morse...
I am Jack's witty signature line
It has to do with the relative length of time it takes to send morse characters. (Note in the following that "dahs" are three times as long as "dits".)
For example, "AND" is di-dah dah-dit dah-di-dit, while "ES" is dit di-di-dit. "AND" takes more than three times as long to send as "ES", so "ES" has become popular. Similar logic leads to the use of "FB" over "OK", although both are heard.
The letter "O", dah-dah-dah, is particularly troublesome, since it is a popular vowel in English, yet it is very long; other letters are often substituted for it when possible. On the other hand, "E", dit, is the shortest letter; it is often used to to substitute for other vowels. "FER" for "FOR" is the result.
Morse code gets @, but I still have to use the shift key to type an email address?
It's really trinary consisting of dot, dash, and pause.
Eat at Joe's.
At least there's still no code for "!", which should discourage most Morse spam.
Okay, now I'm all dizzy.
This is Slashdot, Not dash-dot!
I'll get my coat
Second: it's inefficient. It's a binary code (dit and da) and yet it's redundant. The Shannon entropy for English is lower than the calculated average message length for Morse. They should be using a Huffman code.
Suggestion: Create a Huffman code from well-known English letter frequencies. When constructing this code, always put the more-common subtree on the left side of the new Huffman node. Then, when translating to das and dits, always use dit for a left-going branch and da for a right-going branch (dit = 0, da = 1). This accounts for the fact that the "da" symbol takes longer to transmit than "dit".
The result won't be Morse code, but we could name it something else... "Huffman-Morsoid," or say, "Horse code."
What's that, a new prosign "TAR"? Perhaps you meant the "Commercial A", or "at sign", rendered as "AC" - "didadadidadit"?
Yeah, anyway, it seemed silly when it was announced back in early January, and still does. "didah dah" ("at") is only a problem with an address like "kitkat@attbi.net", and is"didadadidadit"?
shorter than "didadadidadit". And is that an "AC", as they say, or is it a "WR", or a "PN"? They all sound the same.
Come on! It's the 21st century! Give us a Morse Unicode conversion table!
Back in the '60s or so, Irv Hoff (who later was instrumental in developing ham packet radio) was a radioteletype ham. 110-bps ASCII was around and in heavy use for landline teletype and those new-fangled minicomputers. But hams were still limited to 60-bps Baudot (5-bit) teletype and obsolete machines. (This was apparently because the FCC didn't have the budget for buying new moniitoring equipment, so it wouldn't legalize the new coding scheme and speed.)
Irv wanted to go faster. Morse wasn't speed-limited and FSK modulation was allowed. So he built a couple copies of a device to convert ASCII to and from morse and send it either at 110 baud or (using tape) some truly hysterical speed.
Of course the FCC heard the high-speed signals that they couldn't translate and came after him. And he said "But they're just morse! Tape them and slow them down and you'll hear it."
So the FCC did. And shortly threw in the towel and legalized 110-baud ASCII.
Which was the whole point of the exercise. B-)
Now I think Irv may have came up with some arbitrary codings for the ASCII symbols that weren't part of Morse during that exercise. If so, and if they were easy for humans to use, it might have made sense to standardize those.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
support TrueType fonts?
What is the technical name for @
...I expect that my royalty checks will start rolling in soon. If not, I may have to claim a patent on this incremental new advancement so that I can charge users a licensing fee.
My lawyers will be contacting you shortly...via Morse code, of course.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
*** Slight Spoiler Warning ****
He only used Morse code to display the output of code that he had written. The output was in plain English. He was free to read the Cryptonomicon in the format he received it.
-rabs
In the the fifth Star Trek movie Scotty used Morse code to send a secret message to Kirk. Morse code used to be required for many military positions until recently.
For any of the posts that wonder if Morse code is still useful, don't forget the scene where the US Captain communicates to Sean Connery via Morse code and the periscope light.
;) Seriously though, it was a cool scene.
"For all I know I could be sending him dimensions of Playmate of the Month."
And the movie said it was based on a true story, so it really happened right?
Travis
(MINOR SPOILER:)
Randy wasn't reading all the crypto documents on his keyboard LEDs; those were JPEGs (scanned from old books) and they were showing up on his screen. The only stuff that he read off the LEDs was the Arethusa intercepts, which were encodable in Morse.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
The Ancient Horse and Buggy carriage company will now offer CD players on all their open buck board wagons. " We ain't a had no orders since ah ddubwa dubwa 2 but iffen anyone wants one o dem ceadee players will put it in for em" said O.B.Celete, the near death president of the company..... Please Morse is dead, Ham radio has two feet in the grave....Slow news day on slashdot????
"It's a pretty big deal... there certainly hasn't been any change [in Morse Code characters] since before World War II."
I thought Morse Code hadn't even been used since World War II.
Has anyone patched "bsdgames" for the @?
Mod this down.
Can't you find someplace else to whine about the reduction of the code requirement? You've got a right to your opinion, but this really isn't the place for it. I'm tired of seeing every forum discussion having anything remotely to do with ham radio devolve into a code vs. no-code debate. It's happened! Can't we just move on? (For the non-hams out there, if you could harness the energy dissapated by all the flames in all the flamewars on this topic, the resulting fireball would make the sun look like a cigarette butt).
Watching folks opreate code who are very skilled is indeed impressive. There are still lots of ham operators who enjoy using morse code on it's own merits. It will live on, required or not.
Ben Gelb, KF4KJQ
Morse code saved my life. Consider what the effort of learning martial arts or carrying a concealed weapon entails and the compair to the code and communications by sound, light, or radio.
isn't it about time to open source that Morse Code? :-)