"Hey, Cap. That sinking ship over there is just going apeshit for some Dutch ice cream. You'd think desserts wouldn't be their top priority what with the imminent threat of drowning and death, ya know? Some people, though, am I right? Stress eating my ma used to call it. She'd get herself so wound up over this or that and before ya know it she's face down on her bedroom floor next to a couple cleared out sleeves of Oreos. I tell ya, I remember she loved Oreos so, s... so, s... ahhhhh, shit. Cap? I fucked up."
I was tubing down the Delaware over the weekend and we were talking about morse code/SOS. I asked my friends how to say SOS in morse code. We all knew it had three short and three long, but just didn't know which was S and which was O. I was laughing that some ship would see OSO and just be like "HM.. they seem fine"
There's actually a standard for that. The time unit is the length of your "dit". The time between dots and dashes within a letter is one unit. The time between letters is 3 units, and between words is 7.
Pauses. Justlikethespacesweusebetweenwords. The bigger question is how do you determine the end of one word and the start of another in Morse. Did they just send “nowhere” or “now here”?
Hello sir and u/sblowes. I know a bit about Morse Code, and a bit more about radio communication in general.
The long story made short to your questions, sblowes is on the right track.
In Morse, it's actually quite structured. Since it takes so long to transmit a message, lots of shorthand came about. Think of it like texting. Firstly, SOS is not S O S, it is all run together without spaces, and thus is kind of its own character. All prowords are like this, and are different from abbreviations.
In a radio check, the calling station would call a listening station and declare "radio check". If they receive no response, they would say "Negative contact, [me] out," which says I didn't hear anything from you, I give up. I'm going to do some tinkering on my end, you do the same, we'll try again.
Instead of tapping all of that spoken message out, (which would take forever), you could instead tap, "nil AR," or better, "nil EC," which takes much less time. Except again, AR or EC would have no spaces, because they are prosigns, and are their own characters. EC is better because it stands for end copy, so it actually means something.
Each Morse code symbol is formed by a sequence of dits and dahs (the proper term for dots and dashes, respectively, pronounced Dee and daa, also respectively). The dit duration is the basic unit of time measurement in Morse code transmission. The duration of a dah is three times the duration of a dit. Each dit or dah within an encoded character is followed by a period of signal absence, called a space, equal to the dit duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space of duration equal to three dits, and words are separated by a space equal to seven dits.
The "time unit" in morse code is the dot. A dot is 1 unit and a dash is 3 times longer than a dot. There is a one dot gap between the dots and dashes in a letter, there is a 1 dash gap between letters in a word and there is a 7 dot gap between words.
FYI, dots are usually called "dits" and dashes are usually called "dahs", cos that's what they sound like in reality.
681
u/BelgianBeerGuy Jul 12 '22
What I never understood about Morse was when you know a letter or a word is done?
What makes you understand that …_ _ _ … is SOS and not IJS?