…kinda an unfortunate answer to have to give :) well they call it Silent Mode which makes it a bit better although it’s inconsistent … I digress
Morse is the encoding scheme; CW is one particular method of transmission. You could instead flash a light source, or you could use FM radio, or… I don’t know… use smoke signals! CW (‘continuous wave’) just means ‘pulsing a carrier wave on and off’.
One difference is that, if you tune an ordinary AM radio to the carrier frequency, in the CW case you’d hear nothing. In this case, you’d hear the tone as intended.
This would be a great learning tool for those of us who are trying to learn it also.
I journal a little bit about my experience here: https://owoga.com/posts/2025-03-18-learning-morse-code/
I've been a licensed HAM for a while, but what actually prompted me to start learning Morse code was when I was troubleshooting some hardware that only had a blinking light to communicate back to me. Instead or print statements, I started using blinks to tell me what was happening. I realized it would be so much faster if I knew Morse code.
LICW is a great place to learn. But I also recently discovered https://morsecode.world/ and really like it.
I've got a lot of friends who are avid CW users. One friend used to do CW in his car, which is also very cool.
I learned CW with SuperMorse (on DOS). I went from no skills to passing the General/Advanced in two weeks. It was a fun and easy way to learn.
Morse requires you to know when the tone both starts and stops in order to differentiate a ‘dah’ from a break indicating a new letter or word or even just a ‘dit’.
Tapping a pencil only gives you the start of a tone since the pencil lift is silent. There is no real way to distinguish between a short tone and a pause (letter e) and a long tone (letter t) if you don’t know when the tone ends and a pause begins.
The same trope is shown in movies. You cannot tap Morse code if the recipient cannot hear when the tap ends.
In other words, the receiver has no way of knowing whether you sent an e or t without there being a signal that the pencil has lifted. Note that e or t can be substituted for any other number of paired letters.
The other issue is that it can take weeks of study to even reach a minimal level of fluency in Morse. 5 WPM is the basic metric. You could tap faster with much more practice, but the proctor would almost certainly notice the student furiously tapping patterns onto their desk with their pencil.
To review you need to devote weeks of study to learn an encoding that is poorly suited for the task, and that has a very slow transmission rate so that you can transmit a message that everyone in the room might be able to hear?
Morse just isn’t a practical way to cheat.
Narrowing kids educational resources and knowledge in an attempt to stop bullying is a fools errand.
When I was in school, they'd just come up with agreed upon dog whistles and use them in front of you, directed at you. They'd usually be otherwise innocuous but packed with some alternative meaning only the in-group knew until they told you.
That's a lot less effort than learning an entire communication system.
If you even had to think about if a site like this is appropriate for teenagers, the problem isn't kids harassing each other.
This site is timely. Just the other day I turned on the emergency setting on my flashlight and thought oh that's an interesting pattern. Why would it flash three long then three short then three long? About 30 seconds later I realized that I had forgotten an entire alphabet.
___
SOS (emergency call) = ...---...
SMS = ... -- ...
SOS (three letters) = ... --- ...I like to be able to build the smallest possible radios--and nothing's simpler than a CW transmitter. I have a 5 watt transceiver (based on a Si48xx rx chip) that fits in an altoid tin I use when I travel. Hang a wire off the hotel balcony (I have a mini EFHW tuner, too) and start making contacts.
I've been an "extra" since 1977, so we had to learn code back then. I also have the (now-obsolete) first class radiotelegraph licence where I had to copy code at an FCC field office at 25 WPM for 5 minutes in order to pass....
Back when I was really active, I had an iambic key in my truck and would make QSO's mobile.
"For centuries people communicated across distances only as quickly as the fastest ship or horse could travel. Generations of innovators tried and failed to develop speedier messaging devices. But in the mid-1800s, a few extraordinary pioneers at last succeeded. Their invention--the electric telegraph--shrank the world more quickly than ever before.A colorful tale of scientific discovery and technological cunning, The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. By 1865 telegraph cables spanned continents and oceans, revolutionizing the ways countries dealt with one another. The telegraph gave rise to creative business practices and new forms of crime. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. And attitudes toward everything from news gathering to war had to be completely rethought.The telegraph unleashed the greatest revolution in communications since the development of the printing press. Its saga offers many parallels to that of the Internet in our own time--and is a fascinating episode in the history of technology."
Programming in lua and writing my diary in Morse code on this microscopic device was a lot of fun.
Morse was a clever way to bypass limitations, which is the definition of hacking itself.
The chip was fairly successful and years later someone out in the world noticed the funny blinking on their retail USB drive that used it and they figured it out. They wrote a letter to the editor of Byte or Dr. Dobbs or something, wondering what the message "Sis you rock!" meant. Twisted sister fan, maybe?
We saw the letter in the magazine and were chuffed that our easter egg had hatched but... It turns out the designer had typoed the table of ASCII-to-morse values and dot/dash timing he used to build the messaging circuit, so it really was saying "Sis you rock!". And because he also wrote the test it didn't catch the error. Doh!
We also had an option to connect up via serial and it would dump DEFCON or our team name at the terminal and we had games on the terminal. Amongst other things our badge did, it was a great value for $20
Ie playing a word backwards results in another word.
The most interesting one I found is TREVOR / ROBERT
Other notable mentions:
fins / sail
urea / nerd
waits / sting
loops / spoof
queer / reedy
rebel / fever
sdh9•5mo ago
spogbiper•5mo ago
boxerbomb•5mo ago
spogbiper•5mo ago
i have attended club meetings and activities, hamfests local and around the US, participated in online forums etc for many years. morse code isn't a big topic anywhere outside of very specialized contexts, such as field day and qrp operation.
tarxvf•5mo ago
This is, I think, because it's easier to learn than ever, ham radio equipment is more capable for a cheaper (adjusted) price, and ham radio has grown tremendously worldwide due to all barriers being lowered a bit.
CW is very popular, especially given all the other options that are easier.
That it's a smaller percentage of hams that know CW than before is another way of saying ham radio has expanded well beyond CW and the population has grown. But if you have a finite resource (bandwidth) and it's in significantly more demand than ever before, it's a hard argument to suggest that it's not 'very' active.
renehsz•5mo ago
But the bands tell the opposite story, as crowded as they often are. I think the primary reason to use CW these days is because it's fun, it feels like you're really doing something and not just delegating the whole task to the computer, and CW is definitely far better than SSB for DX at low, possibly QRP, power.