[Elecraft] Re: Fuel for the Morse interface fire

[wayne burdick]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the interesting statistics about Morse vs. text messaging.

Morse has three other ergonomic advantages you didn't mention:

1. You can send Morse with one hand (even medium-fast text messaging 
requires two hands)

2. You can send Morse without looking at the actuation device (text 
messaging would be very difficult to do without looking)

3. You can *receive* Morse without looking at the device, too (text 
messaging with synthesized speech output would suffer from heavy use of 
abbreviations, proper nouns, etc.)

These three factors would make Morse easier to use (for someone who 
knows it and can do head-copy) when driving, at night, or in other 
situations where only one hand is available. (Sending discrete messages 
across a conference table or checking stock listings while in church 
come to mind. And of course, 12-year-olds would just love it for 
cheating on tests.)

An effective keychain PDA/communicator would be shaped such that when 
it was held, the user's thumb and index finger would be ideally 
positioned near the dot and dash switches, with the palm and the other 
three fingers providing stability. You might add another switch near 
the middle finger to serve as a mode control, "enter" function, 
backspace, or virtual cursor control during list playback.

Another interesting twist would be to take advantage of the sense of 
touch (haptics), not just the ability to actuate the switches. For 
example, miniature solenoids in the switches could "push back" on your 
fingers, creating force-feedback to emulate different levels of switch 
resistance or even sending Morse back to you through your fingertips as 
an alternative to an acoustic interface.

I'm not sure how fast one can copy CW this way  ;)

73,
Wayne
N6KR


On May 16, 2005, at 6:25 PM, Craig Rairdin wrote:

> For fun I ran the text of the
> Bible through a program that counted keystrokes using each of these 
> methods....

> There are some other interesting advantages to a CW interface....


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