Mastodawn

Diane Bruce VA3DB

Someone asked me about the difference between Morse code and Morse code. ;)
I remember receiving a book on Samuel Morse years ago when I was a teenager and the table confused me to no end until I learned the difference. ;)
It would have been so much less confusing had they labelled it Vail code but that's not what happened eh?

https://morsecodeconverter.net/american-morse-code-vs-international-morse-code/

#AmateurRadio #hamRadio #Morse #CW #Vail #MorseCode #AlfredVail #SamuelMorse

Abraxas3d W5NYV 2d ago

@va3db wait, where is the punctuation?

Diane Bruce VA3DB 2d ago

@abraxas3d oh good point!

Abraxas3d W5NYV 1d ago

@va3db thank you for posting this. I'm trying to figure out some telegraphy stuff that I didn't know about, based on reading this article!

I think we get to the same place that RTTY gets, where you have to have a different "case" and re-use the symbols, because you literally run out of ways to name the symbols? If we want umlauts etc. then we can't have question marks etc unless we organize it. The way RTTY does it is to have a control character to switch between reused sets of encodings.

Diane Bruce VA3DB 1d ago

@abraxas3d Well certainly for Murray code (Baudot) we also have to shift for numbers. It's a tradeoff. 7 bit ASCII is less noise resistant than 5 bit Baudot. UTF with 32bits would be hard which is why we have UTF8.

Abraxas3d W5NYV 1d ago

@va3db I have to think that we can take all of the letters and diacriticals and come up with an upper bound. Then, we list off all the punctuation. Then we figure out how many sets we need?

Diane Bruce VA3DB 1d ago

@abraxas3d Oh ISO-8859 was a mess.
https://fship.com/charsets/iso8859.html
It's why {[ and }] encode to the same char on IRC. Finnish inventor!

ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup

A commented graphical overview of the ISO 8859 character sets

Abraxas3d W5NYV 1d ago

@va3db an inventor that speaks a language with 15+ noun cases?

Well, ok. Maybe that's not a factor here...

<follows the link>

Dear God. Wow. Holy shit.

Diane Bruce VA3DB 1d ago

@abraxas3d This is why we went to Unicode. UTF-8 allows us to encode Unicode in 8 bits.
Of course Windows had their own crazy encoding, Commodore had their own (squeezed graphic chars in) Strictly speaking ASCII is a 7 bit code.

Abraxas3d W5NYV 1d ago

@va3db UTF-8 makes all sorts of things work in Opulent Voice, so I'm on board.

I just keep holding out hope that there's something more efficient, or more stripped down, more simple, more elegant - but we've already done this work and we already know the answer.

Diane Bruce VA3DB 1d ago

@abraxas3d Removing redundancy increases error rates. I'll take a bit more redundant for slightly decreased errors. Same reason I never use compression in tape (Whatever that means nowadays!) backups. A garbled bit or block is better than losing an entire backup.

@abraxas3d @va3db That's how you end up just huffman encoding like PSK31.

Come On Giant Asteroid!20h ago

@abraxas3d @va3db

LTRSTHAT IS CORRECT.

Abraxas3d W5NYV 11h ago

@VE2UWY tee hee

Diane Bruce VA3DB 10h ago

@VE2UWY @abraxas3d My parents were impressed with the TTY-15 I had.

Onno (VK6FLAB)2d ago

@va3db I did some research .. there's a "few" others out there.

https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/96wzd4/the_joy_of_finding_a_morse_code_chart/

Andreas, DJ3EI, he/him 2d ago

Vail code. And Gerke code.

And the stuff with numbers only and a hefty code book, there you have your one and only true Morse code.

Diane Bruce VA3DB 1d ago