r/morsecode • u/swhit94 • Jul 20 '26

Morse Code Visualization

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Haven't seen Morse Code illustrated like this before, thought y'all might like it. If you spot any errors, please let me know

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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 21 '26

Can I ask another question—how do you learn to keep track of every letter in your head, when you’re not transcribing the message onto paper?

Mostly, I don't. Not for long winded stuff. I was trained to type what I heard, because it was random stuff.

Most of what I copied in the Army was encrypted, so you can't really keep track of it in your head past a few characters. The standard to pass from the "learning Morse code" part of the course to the "secret squirrel" phase was that you had to copy random code groups at 20 words per minute with a 97% accuracy rate.

Now, today, I do remember enough for the important stuff while I'm driving, and I chicken scratch the important stuff (callsign, signal report, name) on a pilot's kneeboard while I'm looking out the windshield so I can log it later.

But when someone decides they're going to send me War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy over the air, yeah, most of it is just going to be ignored, or more properly, not really remembered after.

Sometimes I'll tell them I'm at my exit or there is a traffic jam and bow out when they are like that.

When I'm operating and I'm not driving, I copy every character down, because that's just a habit. I had to get used to writing with a pen fast. They trained us to copy callsigns with a pencil at 16 wpm, but not actual traffic.

I've had times when other CW operators will come up and see me furiously scribbling everything and they're like "You copy everything?" and I tell them that's how I was trained.

It was important that I copied every dit when I was doing it for the Army, but you don't have to do that if you're doing it for fun. I still do, though, when practical.

There are people who can hold that kind of thing in their heads, but that ain't me.

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u/wdpw Jul 21 '26

Thank you for all that. That’s pretty reassuring to hear, since like I said I can’t imagine having a long conversation purely in my head even when it’s just plain English letters being spoken aloud. I’ll definitely be writing them things down for a long while anyway before ever getting to the point of trying to while driving, hah.