[TWIAR] Morse Code in danger of disappearing (Louisiana)

[Greg Williams]

Morse Code in danger of disappearing

By ED CULLEN
Advocate columnist
Published: Mar 19, 2006

http://www.2theadvocate.com/columnists/atticsalt/2488746.html

An editor who was a Coast Guard radioman handed me a copy of a wire 
story about the Morse Code. Across the top, he’d written — “dit, dit, 
dah, dit — dah, dit, dah, dah — dit, dit.”

The editor’s coded message, written in a way discouraged by our 
instructors at Navy radio school, said “FYI.”

In the 1960s, radio telegraphy was still taught in military 
communication schools. It differed from the way Samuel F.B. Morse’s code 
sounded. Modern Morse Code, sent by radio transmitter, is a series of 
short and long tones. Early Morse Code relied on holes punched in paper 
or the spaces between clicks generated by electricity passing through an 
electromagnet.

In the Boy Scouts, we learned the code in written form first, a practice 
frowned upon by serious telegraphers because it slowed one’s deciphering 
the received code. Code, it was argued, should be regarded as another 
foreign language. The operator should be able to hear a series of dits 
and dahs and recognize a word. He shouldn’t have to first visualize the 
code. He should hear it and know the words as though someone were 
speaking to him in French.

When the U.S. military abandoned the Morse Code as outdated and slow, 
old radiomen wrote letters to the newspapers defending their art. It is 
true that the code can be “copied” when the radio bands make voice 
communication unworkable, but not enough people knew the code or could 
copy it at speed sufficient to make it practical.

There was the telephone, after all. And cell phones. And, of course, 
computers. All of which failed during Hurricane Katrina.

Ham radio operators didn’t use much code during Katrina, compared to the 
thousands of messages relayed by voice, but it was there if needed.

One of the great ironies of Katrina is that state-of-the-art 
communications systems, private and ones run by the government, failed. 
Ham radio operators using relatively inexpensive equipment carried the 
ball for weeks after the storm.

Now, even ham radio may be turning its back on the code or CW 
(continuous wave).

The FCC has been asked to drop the code requirement in ham radio 
licensing which makes sense. CW isn’t used by that many hams, and it 
keeps young people from applying for radio licenses. Without new blood, 
it’s feared the government will auction off parts of ham bands to 
commercial interests.

But hams fear that if the FCC makes it too easy to get an amateur 
license amateur radio will go the way of Citizens Band.

The code is what attracted me to ham radio. When I get on the air, it is 
code that I use. I haven’t anything urgent to communicate, so the speed 
of CW is just right.

I think there’s an argument for keeping the code. Why should everything 
be easy? Require learning the code, but lower the speed for licensing.

Morse Code is part of the romance of radio, a pastime once so accessible 
to its devotees that many operators built their own transmitters and 
receivers.

Old radios with their softly glowing tubes, homemade antennas and 
handsome brass telegraph keys are art practiced by ordinary Joes and Janes.

The Morse Code was something you could start to learn on a front porch 
on a rainy afternoon. Last week, when the story on Morse Code ran, men 
across the country took the occasion to use a language they learned in 
the service or the Scouts to communicate with kindred spirits. And not 
in e-mail but by making the sounds themselves or writing out the code.

So primitive. So neat.