they have certain codes to split a sentence to help with that problem
ever seen Balto? ( or any period piece with morse codes)
the morse code scenes?
Anchorage. Stop. Repeat urgent request more diphtheria anti-toxin. Stop. Nome in grave danger. Stop. Please help. Stop.
they spell out s-t-o-p periodically to keep it simple
also people are generally pretty good at recognizing patterns, especially after they’ve been trained to look for certain ones
so once they have been trained to look for it, it becomes easier, because everyone’s using the same patterns
Just with practice like anything else. When I started to learn Japanese, to me the native speakers spoke so fast I couldn’t make out individual words. Now (a few years later) it’s almost normal to me.
Back to morse code, a family member was a station master (at a train station) before WW2. He started in the radio room when morse code was still the primary method of communications between stations.
He told me that he would sometimes doze off while on duty on the communications desk in the middle of the night, with morse code chattering in the background.
But as soon as he heard “dit-dah-dit-dah” / his station code when someone tried to reach his station, his hands would instantly be on the telegraph key — replying back in morse code — before he was even fully awake.
By the way he spoke 5 languages fluently, and I would say morse code was his sixth language.
I learnt Morse code for my amateur radio license. At my best, I could read about 20 words per minute.
It is a progression in learning Morse code. Initially, you translate the sounds into dots/dashes and then translate the dots/dashes into alphabets. With practice, your brain reduces this to one translation, sound to alphabet.
Although we commonly say Morse is composed of dits and dahs, there’s a third element that’s just as important: space, or silence. There’s obviously a very short space between the dits and dahs of a letter, or it would be just one continuous tone. Then there’s a longer space between one letter and the next, and a yet longer space between the end of one word and the start of the next.
Ideally, the spaces within a letter are one dit-time, between letters are 3 dit-times (= one dah-time), and between words are 7 dit-times (= the time to send two dahs, including the space between them). Often senders will exaggerate the spaces to make copying easier, but some senders seem to shorten the spaces in a quest for speed, and it does make them hard to copy.
Latest Answers