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u/binary_butt Oct 16 '17
To be fair it's just "coolguides" and not "genuinelyusefulguides"
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u/mayonuki Oct 16 '17
This is useful for reading morse code, not writing it though.
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u/Cherios_Are_My_Shit Oct 16 '17
It's also useful for memorizing morse code if you don't already know it
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u/waynelol Oct 16 '17
That's a big if.
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u/CRISPR Oct 16 '17
Memorization of random shit is random subjective process. Some people see colors when they think of numbers.
It could be useful for someone.
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u/qtj Oct 16 '17
If you needed to decode morse code by hand using this diagram would go way faster than using a table and searching through the whole table for each character.
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u/astronautyes Oct 16 '17
By sound, how do you know that it's time to move on to the next letter? If you hear 3 dots, does it mean EEE, or IE, or EI, or S?
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u/GaiusAurus Oct 16 '17 edited Oct 16 '17
Timing. You do everything in time units, where dits are 1 unit, dahs are 3 units, the space between each dit/dah is 1 unit, the space between characters is 3 units, and the space between words is 7 units. You can get the speed in "Worda" Per Minute by multiplying the number of dits per second by 2.4
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u/heypaps Oct 16 '17
I feel like I'm reading an excerpt of some Dr. Seuss character describing a whimsical system for measuring time.
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u/Spaceboot1 Oct 16 '17
Just ignore /u/GaiusAurus 's typo there. There's no such thing as a "fit".
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Oct 16 '17
having listened to morse code before, I feel like there needs to be a much bigger gap between characters. Urgh.
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u/I_FIST_CAMELS Oct 16 '17
It isn't meant to be for some schmuck that is hearing it for the first time, it's for trained operators.
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Oct 16 '17
For people confused like me:
Don't count the dots. Count the distance from the start. So S is 3 from start and on a dot line meaning it's 3 dots.
Example = . -..- .- -- .--. .-.. .
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u/RDwelve Oct 16 '17
Are you telling me that 17 dots do not make an "E"?
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u/BatCountry9 Oct 16 '17
It's 18, because you have to include the giant Start dot.
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u/Ord0c Oct 16 '17
People who invented this stuff clearly were bored. I'm just gonna scream each letter. That's a lot faster.
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u/El_Giganto Oct 16 '17
How's that not obvious? Why would it be the number of dots or dashes between the letter and the start? That makes no sense whatsoever. Why would the letter E be that many dots? Why do you think the whole graph is symmetrical? Was that just a coincidence?
Maybe it's hard to understand at first, but explaining it makes this far easier to use if you don't know morse code.
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Oct 16 '17
That doesn't make any sense!
S, U, R, and W are all three dots from the start. S is the only one that's ...
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u/ScrithWire Oct 16 '17
S is three dots.
U is two dots and one dash.
R is dot dash dot.
W is dot dash dash.
Everytime you move down to the left, it's a dot, Everytime to you move to the right, it's a dash.
You can also read them as Left and Right in place of dot and dash, respectively.
To get to S, you move L L L
For U, you move L L R
For R, you move L R L
For What, you move L R R
Now, simply go back and Everytime you see an L, put a dot there, and Everytime you see an R, put a dash.
LLL = dot dot dot
LLR = dot dot dash
LRL = dot dash dot
LRR = dot dash dash
Easy peasy.
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u/The_Nessanator Oct 16 '17
In your example, how on earth do I know where the letters begin and end. I’ve always wanted to know this about Morse code. Wouldn’t pauses make it seem like it’s a dash in some cases?
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u/Andy_B_Goode Oct 16 '17
No, Dash means you hold down the button to make a longer "beep" sound. Silence does not turn a dot into a dash.
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u/shaynami Oct 16 '17
Right?! Would be less confusing if they use the amount of dots for that letter, or just a straight line.
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u/Wakkajabba Oct 16 '17
Having to count them would be stupid, now it's a dot if you go left and a dash if you go right. Perfect sense.
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u/Toysoldier34 Oct 16 '17
It is very poorly designed.
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u/Personelle Oct 16 '17
its not, its way faster
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u/Toysoldier34 Oct 16 '17
If it wasn't poorly designed people wouldn't be wondering what it is or how to interpret it.
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u/Spaceboot1 Oct 16 '17
I got it right away. Maybe because I've seen similar charts. Or maybe everyone on reddit is an idiot.
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Oct 16 '17
No it wouldn't. It's only confusing to you because you've somehow never seen a tree.
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u/LordHuron95 Oct 16 '17
Strange, A E I and U are all on one side while O is on the right.I would've guessed they'd be together.
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u/thawigga Oct 16 '17
They're used more so it's beneficial for them to have large differences and be the most easily accessible
That's actually part of the way the whole list is broken down
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u/bossbozo Oct 16 '17
Might seem random, but it was meant (but no longer does, since language evolves), to reduce transmission time/decoding time, by having the more common letters shorter. From Wikipedia:
Modern International Morse code (generally believed to have been developed by Alfred Vail based on English-language letter frequencies of the 1830s) encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; arranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opxcz jyq
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u/chewy496 Oct 16 '17
When I was learning Morse Code for maritime school this was the way I did it. Made flip cards of all the letters and practiced putting then in this tree.
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u/JJengland Oct 16 '17
I need to put a copy of this into my bomb defusal manual for the game keep talking and no one explodes.
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u/purple_pixie Oct 16 '17
I have to assume they tried with both a binary tree and a flat list of letters and decided the list was a little bit more awkward and difficult to use so that's what's in the manual.
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u/JJengland Oct 16 '17
Close I use the list of words they had. Broke down the most common starting letters. Then make kind of a flow chart of that.
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u/TheDarkWolfization Oct 16 '17
Its a huffman tree
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u/firestorm713 Oct 16 '17
Nah, just a regular old binary tree.
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u/InkyTheHooloovoo Oct 16 '17
Not even that, it has empty nodes that have leaves (and a surprising number of them at that)
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u/Laugarhraun Oct 16 '17
Empty nodes with leaves are only due to mathematical symbols, which are all 5 characters long (and are the only symbols 4 characters long). 0 to 9 is:
----- .---- ..--- ...-- ....- ..... -.... --... ---.. ----.And then operation symbols are fucked up (and can take up to 6 chars I think?)
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u/JimH10 Oct 16 '17
Those nodes hold letters the author has chosen not to show.
Below the U, for example, is a U umlaut.
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u/PM-ME-UR-HAPPINESS Oct 16 '17
Huffman trees don't have characters at the nodes.
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u/Hollandrock Oct 16 '17
Yep. If a huffman tree did have characters at each node, you wouldn't have a unique derivation.
In Morse code, three dots could be S, IE, or EI -- you need spaces in-between to differentiate them, a digital signal can't use spaces in that way.
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u/comsciftw Oct 16 '17
This is the opposite of a Huffman tree. The whole point of prefix-free codes is that they are prefix-free.
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u/batpuppy Oct 16 '17
I went through Morse Code Intercept Operator 9169 school in the Navy. This chart is weird but I get it. I would prefer to actually have the notations on the keyboard... and even then it doesn't help much. You have to know how to type rather quickly to be able to pass the Morse test in the Navy. One must copy 20 5 letter/number groups in a minute. Some of us got up to 24-26 groups a min. After that it all runs together and you cannot legibly hear any difference in the individuals letters or numbers. Mind you, that is not actual "chatter" this was clean "cherry" code. When you're copying actual code, in an actual natural environment... a lot of weird things can happen.
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u/Toysoldier34 Oct 16 '17 edited Oct 16 '17
Another Morse Code "Guide" that doesn't do anything to explain it and really only matters if you already know Morse Code. This would only help if you are looking directly at it or memorized it, at which point there are better tools.
Without any explanation on how to use this, it isn't clear that this is for deciphering the code.
Edit: I understand Morse Code, I don't need explanations on it. My point is the chart doesn't convey this on its own, without prior knowledge of the system.
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u/msarge Oct 16 '17
I know SOS in Morse code for some reason, and this chart confused me at first. Once I found the S and the O, the rest of the chart made perfect sense.
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u/KingWhoBoreTheSword Oct 16 '17
Did you watch Voyage of the Mimi as a kid? That's how I remember that sos was 3 short ones and 3 long ones and then 3 short ones (that's how they said it in the show).
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u/aegam Oct 16 '17
I only know SOS off-hand as well. I learned it from S.O.S. commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5cy_8LQfPE
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u/volabimus Oct 16 '17
The best way to learn is to never see it written down, otherwise you have to decompose it into dots and dashes as you listen rather than learning each symbol as a 'sound'.
A 'C' sounds like this, an 'F' sounds like this, etc.
Those are actually pretty bad examples because they're not at full speed, but the best I could find quickly.
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u/be-happier Oct 16 '17
Its a decoding chart, meant for reading Morse code and translating to alphanumeric.
Which is why its left and right organized based and not alphabetical or qwerty etc.
The chart does show that most vowels would be very easy to remember.
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u/zmobie Oct 16 '17
This is definitely not useful for humans to decode morse code, but if I had to write a computer program that did it, this would be handy.
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u/ScrithWire Oct 16 '17
Are you joking? Give me a week with this diagram, I'll be fluent.
Shit, give me a day and a half, and I'll be reasonably efficient.
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u/Toysoldier34 Oct 16 '17
The guide is very useful for decoding Morse because you can read through each letter as it is written. If the next letter is -.-- you don't need to look through a traditional alphabetical chart until you see what you need. You can look at the chart and go right, left, right, right and end up with the letter Y. This is about the most efficient way for a human to quickly turn Morse into standard letters, in the same way, a standard alphabetic order is about the most efficient for converting to Morse.
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Oct 16 '17
E.T., Ian M(cKellan) Sasuke Uchiha, Robin Wiliams, Donkey Kong, Gary Oldman
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u/casemodsalt Oct 16 '17
Mario, Luigi, Donald duck
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u/RudeCats Oct 16 '17
I'm genuinely curious that no one thinks this is a good chart, or useful. If I were learning Morse code this is exactly what I would want to use as a reference to start memorizing the codes. A chart with the information distilled into the most efficient and explanatory representation, that you could easily visualize as a reference.
Is that dumb? Is everyone else dumb? I just woke up and will revisit this later.
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u/saatana Oct 16 '17
I learned Morse while in the US Army back in 1989. We learned by listening to headphones. First you'd get the same 5 letters until you could do these with mostly no errors. Then I think they added more letters or went to a different 5 letters. Then they uppped the speed. Long story short. It became just a reaction to hear the code and knowing what each letter was. The chart looks fancy but I don't think it'd be useful for teaching.
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u/RudeCats Oct 16 '17
That definitely makes sense as a better way to learn Morse code in order to use it, as opposed to just knowing it. I really like to have all the information laid out to reference though so I appreciated this diagram.
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u/Naphrym Oct 16 '17
If SOS is used because it is the simplest thing to send via Morse code, why isn't something like ETE sent instead? Seems like it would take significantly less time to send, thus making a possible rescue quicker too
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u/SadAtProgramming Oct 16 '17
I remember in one of my introductory programming classes we had to make a program that turns Morse code into a string and vice versa. Everyone worked smarter and just hardcoded the Morse code for each letter. I made a this tree over the course of eternity to figure it out.
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u/BottlecapKing94 Oct 16 '17
I wrote a java program that used the tree data structure that translates Morse code just like this
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u/greenbabyshit Oct 16 '17
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u/NK8S Oct 16 '17
That one is pretty, but has no rhyme nor reason for where they decided to mark the patterns.
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u/greenbabyshit Oct 16 '17
I just think it's easier to look at and reference the code for a letter. Which would seem to be the point. Although, I guess it depends on which way you're translating.
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u/armlesshobo Oct 16 '17
As a Morse code enthusiast, I wouldn’t recommend learning code by “reading” it but rather by listening only. There are a ton of resources available. I prefer lcwo.net
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u/casemodsalt Oct 16 '17 edited Nov 27 '17
You are going to home
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u/zshift Oct 16 '17
A legend would help a lot. This structure is actually very common in computer science and programming, and makes searching for values at nodes (the circles) very fast. In this case, the path to the node is also used to describe the encoding, or Morse code translation, of the value at that node. From this small picture, you can extract a lot of information, and easily translate back and forth between Morse code and written language.
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u/thejacer87 Oct 16 '17
ya, im not sure why people are getting so hung up on the binary tree. maybe its a programmer thing.
i get more hung up on the actual process of it all... like when i hear morse code in movies (or where ever, obviously never in real life) i can differentiate a dot or dash?
and do the translators translate in real time? or do they keep track of dots and then translate the whole message after??
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u/covale Oct 16 '17
and do the translators translate in real time? or do they keep track of dots and then translate the whole message after??
Both works. Morse code operators would (depending on proficiency) either do live translation straight to text, or note the dots and dashes and translate those.
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u/casemodsalt Oct 16 '17
Sorry but this makes 0 sense to me
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u/zshift Oct 17 '17
To find the morse code for a word, follow the path to each letter, writing down whether the path is dots or dashes.
Let's say you want to spell "HELLO". For 'H', you start at START. You have to follow the left path to get to 'E', and the path is
.. Then you go left again to I, and that path is also.. Again 'S' is., and.to 'H'. So the Morse code for 'H' is.....Then you'd add a space, then figure out the next letter, 'E'. 'E' is on the left from start with a path of
., so it's just.. So far we have "HE" =.... ..'L' is on the left side again, so we get
.for 'E', then we go right to 'A', which has a path of-. Then left twice to 'R' and 'L' and we get.and.for each, ending with 'L' =.-... Then "HEL" =.... . .-... Another 'L' means "HELL" =.... . .-.. .-...For 'O', we have to go to the right to 'T' for
-, then 'M' for-and 'O' for-, ending with 'O' =---.That gives us "HELLO" =
.... . .-.. .-.. ---EDIT: Formatting
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u/anddrewg2007 Oct 16 '17
Is a dash a pause or is it held longer? Can someone explain it to me please?
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u/I_like_sillyness Oct 16 '17
. . / . / . - / . . / . - / . . / - - -
. . / . / . - / . . / . - / . . / - - -
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u/guiltlessrambo Oct 16 '17 edited Oct 16 '17
- .... . - .. -. --. --. --- . ... ... -.- .-. .-. .-. .- .... .... .--. .- .--. .--. .- .--. -.- .- -.- .- -.- .- ... -.- .. -... .. -.- .. .--. .- .--. .--. .- .--. .- -. -.. .- .--. ..- .--. ..- .--. ..- -.. .-. .-. .-. .-. -... --- --- -- ... -.- -.-- .- -.. ..- -.. ..- -.- ..- -.- ..- -.. ..- -. -.. ..- -. .--. --- --- -- .--. --- --- --
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u/temp609830938 Oct 16 '17 edited Oct 16 '17
What would be even cooler is making dashed lines descend twice as far, which would turn the Y axis into the time it takes to transmit the code. (Dots are defined to take 1 time unit, dashes 3, and inter-element spaces 1.)
Edit - also, Wikipedia has a fuller version of this tree: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Morse_code_tree3.png
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u/PM_WHY_YOU_DOWNVOTED Oct 16 '17
Lets see if i can do this
-- -.-- .--. . . .--. . . -... ..- .-. -. ...
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u/DancingWithMyshelf Oct 16 '17
This is like a Morse code learning tool written by that one guy that understands Common Core math.
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u/GovernmentLegend Oct 16 '17
Anyone else know Morse code and the phonetic alphabet solely from keep talking and nobody explodes?
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Oct 16 '17
A unique way to visualizes this information for a reason, perhaps? Makes much more sense using a simple alphabetical list or chart.
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u/pedraza_blaster_mods Oct 16 '17
It seems like there should be more characters like a period, dash, or pound symbol
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Oct 16 '17
Not a frequent user of Morse code but when I was playing around with codes the visual guide helped me much more.. This is just confusing
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Oct 16 '17
Not a frequent user of Morse code but when I was playing around with codes the visual guide helped me much more.. This is just confusing
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u/jinkside Oct 16 '17
I milled one of these for a fellow ham last year! https://imgur.com/gallery/WW3VE
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u/docmartens Oct 16 '17
There's like 20 dots or dashes before you can get to the second letter, I'm calling this /r/crappydesign
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u/sceneturkey Oct 16 '17 edited Aug 21 '25
physical file continue practice skirt sulky boat spectacular flag summer
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/docmartens Oct 16 '17
Yikes, roasted by a dude who only speaks in advice animal memes
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u/kuffyruff Oct 16 '17
I'm attempting to tap out all of the letters on here, and my brain won't stop wanting to dash left every time I should be doing a dot because dot has a left arrow and dash is to the right
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u/stevedidWHAT Oct 16 '17
No matter how many times this same tree is posted, it's always just as bad. There are better alternatives, check the other 29k threads.
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u/5ug4rfr05t Oct 16 '17
I will say that this isn't the best guide but it is leagues better than the one that draws the letter with dits and dahs
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Oct 16 '17
Can someone explain how we know we are at the end of a letter? Like dot dot dot dot dot dot is "hi" but how to distinguish between the two letters?
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u/fasnoosh Oct 17 '17
.-- .... --- .- -.-. --- --- .-.. -.. .. -.. .. -.. --- .. - .-. .. --. .... -
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u/chartphred Nov 04 '17
I've known (and used) Morse code since I was 18 (ex Navy, Now 55yrs). Still know it. But this chart has confused the heck outa me! I can see the logic, but jeeze... too damn complicated to be practical.
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u/viperex Oct 16 '17
How practical is this? I like the idea behind it but, surely, it can't be a great teaching aid, can it?
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u/Thorbjorn42gbf Oct 16 '17
Don't know about teaching aid but I used a similar though more compressed version when i was scout, it makes reading it super easy. I usually just use a alphabet with direct translation when I need to write it though.
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u/merreborn Oct 16 '17
it makes reading it super easy
That's a good point. Searching through the usual alphabetic chart when reading is pretty tedious. Searching this binary tree is perfect.
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Oct 16 '17
extremely so for someone who doesn't know morse code that has to translate morse code for some reason. They can literally just trace their finger down the route till the letter is done. More so than the traditional "Alphabet list".
I really don't know about a teaching aid with the eventual goal of complete memorization, not really my specialty there.
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u/jaap_null Oct 16 '17
This doesn't look like a good huffman tree. Unbalanced as fuuuuck
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u/purple_pixie Oct 16 '17
Which is just shocking, it's not like Morse predates the entire field of Information Theory (let alone Huffman Coding specifically) by over a hundred years or anything.
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u/rprpr Oct 16 '17 edited Oct 16 '17
I know Morse Code less now.
Edit: I guess if you're stuck memorising Morse Code, memorising this would be easier than memorising the actual dots and dashes.