In the movies, morse code comes through so fast it’s hard to tell a dot from a dash. Hoe did they keep from getting lost?
In: 1001
I was a commercial radio operator. I qualified sending and receiving international morse at 20 words per minute.
Later, in the Military, I knew people who could receive at 60+ wpm. At those speeds you can hear whole words.
So, at the slower speeds, you have an element of time that is 1 unit. That is the length of a “dit”, a “dah” is 3 units long. The space between the dits and dahs of a character is 1 unit long. The space between characters is 3 units long, or the space of a dah. As you get faster, the timing should stay the same, but what happens once you get proficient, the dits get shorter, and the dahs just become slightly longer dits, say 1.5x the length of a dit. Then you make the spaces within a character as short as possible, and shorten up the spaces between characters as well, but keep them slightly longer.
A good operator has a nice rhythm, and will work with the receiving operator up to that operator’s most efficient speed. It is the rhythm that makes it all work. Think of it as like someone’s speech cadence.
Also, most modern movies just have nonsense, and you don’t hear the whole message because it would take too long.
dah ditditditdit ditdah dahkit ditditdit, ditditdahdit dahdahdah ditdahdit, ditdahdit dit ditdah dahditdit ditdahditdahditdah
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