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Revision as of 15:35, 21 June 2004

Addition of text from the code article

From the code article:

In the days when Morse code was widely used, elaborate commercial codes that encoded complete phrases into single words (five-letter groups) were developed, so that telegraphers became conversant with such "words" as BYOXO ("Are you trying to crawl out of it?"), LIOUY ("Why do you not answer my question?"), and AYYLU ("Not clearly coded, repeat more clearly."). The purpose of these codes was to save on cable costs.

Should this be added to the Morse code article?

Probably, but I also put it back into code; it was a good example of the data compression use that wasn't otherwise well covered there; I also gave it a slightly better introduction. --LDC

International morse code different from original Morse code

This article needs to take into account that the international morse code that is used today is not the same as the telegraphic system that Samuel F. B. Morse created (which was based on numbers). The story is to be found in William Pierpoint's The Art And Skill of Radio-Telegraphy. Sorry, I don't have time to write it up right now, maybe later. -ARJ

American railroad code

it would be nice to have american railroad code here as a table as well as international code. If I get to it I'll add it

Trivia

Just saw this - an anagram of "The Morse code" is "Here comes dots". Well, I found it amusing... -- Jim Regan 03:17 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Elimination of CW requirement in amateur radio licensing

WRTC 2003 eliminated the requirement (made optional) for CW in amateur radio licensing. Did a re-write to incorporate this info, fill in some blanks, and otherwise do some light editing - de NG3K Bill 10:44 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Prosigns and abbreviations

Also added a bunch of commonly used CW abbreviations. Bill 18:02 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Clarified the difference between prosigns and abbreviations; modified the taxonomy to correspond to this; other tweaks Bill 17:01 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Common cw abbreviations should just list the most important few here. Maybe abreviations could have their own article just like Q-codes. Tero 10:34, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Actually, experienced CW operators use abbreviations extensively. Most listed here are quite common and important; could be a separate article, I guess. I would tend to NOT include items that are common abbreviations outside the CW-world however (e.g. QCWA). Bill 22:58, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

..--. is given as the code for the exclamation mark, but from some searching it seems there is no official code for it. It's ---. over radio in the USA and Canada according to note 1 at http://homepages.tesco.net/~a.wadsworth/MBcode.htm - Jeandré 2004-02-20t09:48z

Somebody who knows about these things should probably edit the prosigns comments by 'Concerned reader' into the body of the text. Looks like the comments really should have been inserted here in the discussion. --Orourkek 14:11, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

The prosign SN (VE)

The prosign SN (...-.) is in the international standard, and is actually used by some HF amateurs, though I concede that we have R and QSL for that. See a Google search to confirm this. arj 16:15, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Error codes

I hear "e e e" for "error" about 80 percent of the time. The remaining is almost always a string of continuous dits. I think that this article should mention all variants that are in use, and clearly indicate which of them is standardized by the ITU - which is the latter (........). arj 16:15, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Binary

The article says that Morse code has five different "states" unlike binary, but I think it really does have two: on and off. If we call a 'dit' 1 and a roughly equal amount of silence 0, then SOS could be roughly 101010 111011101110 101010 (10 being a full 'dit', 1110 being a full 'dah')...more zeroes would be a longer pause. Hence, Morse code is a binary system depending on how you look at it...

I think maybe comparing it with binary in the article isn't so great an idea because, as I demonstrated, the interpretation is a bit subjective. --Furrykef 00:23, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

If we take the SOS example, you've got 1 representing a dot, 11 representing a dash, 0 representing the period between taps within a letter, and gaps representing the gaps between the letters -- which uses 3 symbols (0,1,gap). If we turn this fully into bianry by reducing this to just 2 symbols (1 and 0) by replacing the gaps by 0s, we get 10101001110111011100101010) - but that still uses 4 states (1=dot, 11=dash, 0=period between taps, 00=period between letters). What you've actually done is to sample Morse code and code it a second time into binary. You can also represent the music from a violin in binay, but that doesn't mean that violin music is binary.

Commat

Someone changed the "commat" to "commercial at". Is this what the official word is? I didn't see it in any of the news stories surrounding this new character.

Xoder 22:05, Mar 8, 2004 (UTC)

This is common usage in standards documents such as ASCII and Unicode, though not very much elsewhere. See for instance . arj 10:15, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)