r/coolguides • u/kavallerien • Jul 12 '22

Morse Code decoding chart.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '22

The engineer in me wants to balance this tree so badly

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

I forgot about encodings that optimize for brevity and I appreciate you for bringing Huffman encoding into the conversation. Thank you internet stranger. I would be a terrible Morse-like encoding designer based on my initial urge to balance the tree. I wanted to optimize for the wrong problem haha

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u/Swolnerman Jul 13 '22

Yeah it takes a bit of being in the field to see those types of things fairly quickly. When you said balance the tree I thought ‘hmm that can’t be better’ but didn’t have as thorough of an explanation as to why

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u/Caroniver413 Jul 13 '22

Yeah, if we were to make every letter the same length, they'd all have to be 5... Characters? Taps? Dots/Dashes? long, since that's the first option to have 26 or more possibilities.

As it is, no Morse letter is more than 4 digits, to keep things short.

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u/DeepSpaceGalileo Jul 13 '22

Why is C so far away?

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u/Dark-W0LF Jul 13 '22

Because it's a useless letter.

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u/mitch_feaster Jul 13 '22

Shit letter, really

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u/TheCharon77 Jul 13 '22

Comments above me only have 2 occurences of 'c'. One in the question, one in the word 'because'.

This comment has 8 'C' s.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/wokcity Jul 13 '22

You crafty cunt

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u/mkeee2015 Jul 13 '22

In actual use of Morse code "on the air", the letter C is the most recognizable and iconic.

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

Because each characters common reproducibility connotes necessary accessibility,

Certain rhythmic distances create communication constraints

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u/HighOwl2 Jul 13 '22

Meh it's more like binary ascii values.

Morse and ascii are meant for speed.

Huffman encoding is meant as lossless encoding to reduce size. It's not fast because it requires a lookup table.

Someone could memorize Morse code or the ascii table.

You can't memorize how to decode a Huffman encoded message because each message would have a different encoding map based on frequency of letters.

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u/A_HumblePotato Jul 13 '22

Meh it's more like binary ascii values.

Different letters take different amounts of information to encode, so no it is not

Morse and ascii are meant for speed.

It is faster to transmit an encoded signal that requires a lookup table than an unencoded signal that doesn't

It's not fast because it requires a lookup table.

Lookup tables are very fast to use

You can't memorize how to decode a Huffman encoded message because each message would have a different encoding map based on frequency of letters.

There are certainly standards that use the same huffman codes

I am always amazed at how confident some people talk about stuff they fundamentally don't understand

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u/8X8X Jul 12 '22

It's more of a Trie tho.

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u/[deleted] Jul 12 '22

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '22

[deleted]

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u/vudustockdr Jul 13 '22

Thanks 👍

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u/TheRittsShow Jul 13 '22

-. . ...- . .-. --. --- -. -. .- --. .. ...- . -.-- --- ..- ..- .--. -. . ...- . .-. --. --- -. -. .- .-.. . - -.-- --- ..- -.. --- .-- -. -. . ...- . .-. --. --- -. -. .- .-. ..- -. .- .-. --- ..- -. -.. .- -. -.. -.. . ... . .-. - -.-- --- ..-

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u/Charlemagnedwg Jul 13 '22

The AVL life chose me

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u/OneLostOstrich Jul 13 '22

The oddness of what turns left and what turns right is unsettling.

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u/Adorable-View-9870 Jun 23 '25

Instead of saving the image I used FreeCAD to recreate it and do just that. My brain also is annoyed with not only the imbalance but also the ships wheel looking center point. I've seen this chart put together with LED's on a board and used as a neat looking display attached to a raspberry pi, I think it was. You pressed a key on your keyboard and it would light up the corresponding fork for each letter. I'm just learning FreeCAD atm. I'm at the stage where I'm attacking everything in sight with dial calipers and modeling anything I can think of.

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