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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.
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.
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.
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!
...-....-.
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!.
Even more robust than UUCP !
... 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 recently saw it used in a movie...
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
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.
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...
...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"
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
Morse code is the primary communication method during harsh conditions. From the 12 months I was in the navy, about 4 we practised morse code. The same goes for national emergencies, when cell phone networks and other electrical communications networks would be down.
Even in extremely bad radio wheather, and when all other communications networks are down, morse code is audible behind all the hiss and crackle (with good equipment).
Here in Finland, where extreme distances are a problem (our country is twice as big as England with a population of 6 million) radio amateurs have arranged a peer-to-peer network for emergencies. They have a yearly test of the network. Basically even the authorities have to trust this voluntary network when a bigger chrisis occurs.
Audio at http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=16805 29
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
"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
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
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
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
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.
At least there's still no code for "!", which should discourage most Morse spam.
Okay, now I'm all dizzy.
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."
If you know how to listen to Morse... Every time my mobile rings, it makes an CQ call to my callsign and I can spot it over any noise.
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.
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
...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