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Morse Coders Beat SMSers
dgnicholson writes "Jay Leno did a text off between two text messengers and two Morse coders. The Morse coders handily beat the young whippersnappers with time to spare. It might be a fun phone app to make a Morse code messenger, if you kept your headset in and had an external sender, could be interesting. Perhaps a Morse code Skype device."
Someone already wrote an application for Nokia phones that lets you write your SMS by using Morse code.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I get the distinct impression that teens might as well be considered professional SMSers. The volume of messages they put out is staggering. They're the right choice for the job.
Granted, but let's see them repeat the experiment with a device that has a full keyboard on it. I've known people who can type on QWERTY at 120 WPM sustained, let's see any morse guy keep up. Or get one of those closed caption keyers to compete as well -- they apparently go up to 250 WPM.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You can encode, decode and listen to morse here
Oh, and try setting the speed at 40 wpm before you start thinking it's easy!
"It hardly has GSM!"
I'd hardly call 60 million GSM users "hardly having GSM". Not to mention that CDMA2000 also has SMS support.
- You do not require the target to listen to you,
- and you do not require the target to log in to voicemail.
Your listener need only glance at his or her phone to read your message.SMS is incredibly useful because: (a) you don't disturb others in a public place
I beg to differ on this one, if anybody has ever been in a public place and the person sitting fourteen rows away receives an SMS, with an incredibly loud alert tone it is way more annoying than the crazy frog or even the person chatting as with sms they usually get one after another and another continually with the beep beep beeps of the incoming alert "CQ" morse tone (how fitting) on those horrid nokia phones by default - or at least I think thats what it is, I'm no morse coder....
In "spoken" morse, dots are pronounced as DIT (DI- if it's not the final sound in a word), and dashes as DAH.
This (almost) mimics the way morse would actually sound.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
French is a Hindi. It just happens to use different words for most things.
An electric oven is a gas oven. It just happens to use electricity instead of gas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually, the morse guys were amateurs as well. Neither of them has ever had a job in which use of morse code was part of the job.
The earlier contest, on which this one was based, was held in Australia, and was much more lopsided. The SMSer was a high school girl who did NOT have the world record, and the morse code guys were 90-year-old retired telegraphers. It's been a very long time since anybody got paid to send morse code.
Chip and Ken are amateur radio operators, K7JA and K6CTW. The tonight show staff just dressed them up like old-time telegraphers.
VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.
BEDEVERE: The nose?
VILLAGER #1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
The big advantage they had is not the quality of their paddles nor the lack of time shifting (the twirp wasn't anywhere near done sending when they finished). They could send every letter with their fingers on the same buttons. Sending text from a cell phone is like hunt-and-peck typing. Sending morse code is more like touch-typing. I personally could have beaten Chip and Ken 2:1 or better if I'd been there with a decent keyboard to enter the text, and I'm not a particularly good typist:
[hiram@flatus hiram]$ time read line
I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance.
real 0m6.993s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[hiram@flatus hiram]$
Another advantage morse has is that more-common characters have shorter symbols. At the extreme, an E is 1/19 as long as a 0(but only 1/9 as long as a 5 - an artifact of the system for numerics).
Few of these thoughts are my own. This was discussed to death on ham radio mailing lists, on the air, and in coffee shops nation-wide, 3 weeks ago.
Having the capability and really using it is different. It's not reliable and prevalent since people don't use it. People don't use it because it's not prevalent and reliale.
SMSes are very reliable. People don't use it because unlike most of Europe, it is cheaper to talk than to send a SMS.
Here we never had any other system than GSM, and EVERYONE texts. Every major cellphone company has several prime SMS packages. Some people don't even use their phones for voice!
You may be too young to recall analog cell phones in Europe, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
I've been to the States... Blackberry devices and pagers are more prevalent than SMSers.
Because Blackberries are much more than SMS. They let you send/receive email from anywhere. The Blackberry email server lets you connect them to your corporate email system. I've used SMS to email gateways, as well as sending/receiving email from Orange, and there's just no comparison.
Pagers are still around (although the paging market has been shrinking for years) because they are far more reliable than cell phones (even a cell phone in Europe). Radio signals to pagers will go through far more than radio signals to cell phones. There is a reason doctors, police & firefighters still use pagers, even in Europe.
that beep pattern you hear from most phones with the ringers on when they get an SMS message is "... -- ..." which is of course, morse code for "SMS"
Oh the irony!