6 ms·

Scenes from the last operational Morse-code radio station in North America

149 points by fortran77 3y ago

ddol 3y ago
KPH receiving station is 45 miles north of San Francisco, without bridge traffic you can make it in a little over an hour. My father-in-law was an engineer in the navy and loved seeing the morse & radio equipment. But the trip was fun for all the family; the driveway up to the reviving station building is lined with Monterey cypress trees, which have grown into a tunnel. [0] It’s a beautiful scene, my wife and mother-in-law were really taken aback. [0] https://www.nps.gov/places/point-reyes-cypress-tree-tunnel.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/point-reyes-cypress-tree-tunnel.h...
- cylinder714 3y ago
  The Maritime Radio Historical Society, KPH's website: https://www.radiomarine.org/ https://www.radiomarine.org/ The volunteers fire up the transmitters every Saturday; the schedule is on the website.
1st1 3y ago
Direct link to photographer's site with photos: https://www.annhermesphoto.com/radio-squirrels https://www.annhermesphoto.com/radio-squirrels
resters 3y ago
Don't forget that morse is still used by amateur radio operators worldwide.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  I am curious if its use is dropping off. I heard knowing morse is no longer a requirement to get a license.
  - vetrom 3y ago
    It is no longer a requirement, but there is a significant amount of amateur spectrum where CW (morse) is the preferred or only permitted modulation.
  - dbcurtis 3y ago
    It is no longer a license requirement. It is still used for casual contacts by people that enjoy it. It is used for various things that fall under the banner of "radiosport" -- for my part I enjoy Morse-code-only radio contests. It is used for identification beacons for repeaters or propagation beacons. And for radio experimenters, a Morse code transmitter makes a great first project since it is so simple and is foundational to everything that comes after it. Pretty much any transmitter that you build is just extra stuff on top of a Morse code transmitter in one form or another. Morse code has a distinct signal-to-noise ratio advantage over any other simple modulation scheme, since the receiving filter can be so narrow, and 100% of the power is going into the carrier any time you are key-down. This is why Morse code is good for propagation beacons and also for other experiments. There are, of course, modern error-correcting codes that beat it, but then both the transmission and reception become much more complex. (See FT8 for a currently popular weak-signal mode). I view Morse code radio contests much like a sail boat racing. Nobody moves containers of goods from China to LA on sail boats. But lots of people enjoy a good boat race on a sunny afternoon, and enjoy keeping the old marlin-spike seamanship skills alive. Likewise, ftp is a much smarter way to move a 3GB file from London to SF than using Morse code, but that doesn't mean that Morse code isn't good humor during a weekend radio contest.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    One area Morse code is popular is using limited radios. Morse code works well with tiny (phone sized), low power radios. There is challenge called SOTA where hike to top of mountain and make contacts. It is much easier to take small radio and Morse paddle than the bigger radios needed for voice. There are low-power data modes, but then have to carry computer along and deal with software.
  - uint8_t 3y ago
    In absolute terms, probably, but some are declaring a renaissance associated with the increasing popularity in portable operation. Summits On The Air (SOTA) in particular favors lightweight transmitters. CW is such an efficient mode, in terms of speed, reach and circuit design that it is worth learning Morse for that single use case. Personally, once I gained some proficiency with CW I realized that it is an enjoyable pursuit in and of itself, so now while not climbing mountains I stay on the low parts of the band and exchange postcards with octogenarians and I couldn't be happier.
karaterobot 3y ago
It makes me happy to know these guys are out there. I like that they've got a thing they care about and are dedicated to. Sounds like the ship this station communicates with, the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien, is a restored Liberty ship used for day cruises. I'd love to know about the relationship between the (presumably) WWII naval history nerds who restored that ship and the Morse code nerds who operate this station.
- cylinder714 3y ago
  The S.S. Red Oak Victory, a Victory ship built in Richmond, California, is now a museum ship berthed near where it was built. Its radio room, operated by an amateur radio club, is open on Sundays. https://www.qsl.net/redoakarc/ https://www.qsl.net/redoakarc/
dayofthedaleks 3y ago
Nice to see reliable terrestrial radio services chugging along with orbital services becoming less assured. I was recently pleased to see eLORAN is gaining momentum to fill the void left by LORAN-C's shutdown in 2010. 8 meter resolution through radio triangulation is pretty impressive.
jodrellblank 3y ago
Ignoring the Morse Code radio station, in the context of those banks of instruments and controls... each individual readout can be done cheaper and more reliably in software, but doing everything in software means one or two LCD screens. Will it ever be wall-sized banks of screens covered in eInk displays as standard industrial controls? Will it skip straight past that to Augmented Reality?
- ruined 3y ago
  through-hole components and physical controls are standard, durable, and maintainable in a way that microelectronics will never be i see small touchscreens on devices where maintenance doesn't matter but if you need a complex bespoke interface that's durable and lasts for years, you will use a physical control surface made of off-the-shelf parts
  - doubloon 3y ago
    Had an interesting conversation with someone who used to run a radio shack and now works for one of the few remaining 'screwdriver shops' (PC shop). If I understood it, her theory was basically that radio shack wouldn't come back because the size of components nowadays is too small. And its funny you mention touchscreen. Because I bought a mechanical switch from her to do a DIY Mod on a 20 year old car. It was pretty simple and worked well. But this car also had a touch screen that was extremely anti-DIY friendly. These screens tend to get 'burnt' by the sun after 20+ years and stop working correctly. The typical fix for this screen is complete replacement or extremely complex repair via mail. Parts won't be available forever and the whole thing is closed source and incredibly hard to reverse engineer.
WalterBright 3y ago
I patented a scheme where cell phones could communicate with morse code. The idea was to put a rocker switch on the phone, one side for dit and the other for dah. Then, you could text people without needing to look at the display. You could be texting people at a meeting with your hand in your pocket. The phone would convert the morse to text to transmit to your penpal. You could also opt to receive morse by having the phone vibrate in morse so you could stealthily receive texts, too!
- eastbound 3y ago
  Cool. But the boss could subscribe too. Is it encrypted? Are there standards for morse code encryption?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    The morse app would just convert it to/from text, and then the text would be sent by whatever app you would be keyboarding input to.
- nosrepa 3y ago
  You can do that even now! Gboard has had Morse as an option for years.
  - kqr 3y ago
    But almost always with these things it's not iambic/semi-automatic, which it should be to be somewhat useful. I have been looking for morse code keyboards for smartphones and I have only found one that was good, and it was an early iPhone thing that hasn't worked on modern iPhones for years.
- davchana 3y ago
  On older nokia phones un 2000-2004 (when I had them), I could text as long as I know I am on the typing screen. I knew pressing 2 three times gives you c, one 3 gives you D, # changes case, 0 gives you space. Two zeros gives you dot. I remember texting a lot while phone is under the table, or simply in pocket.
WalterBright 3y ago
Much more efficient than the "tap code" prisoners re-invent.
- Retric 3y ago
  POW's who knew more code still resorted to a new "tap code" because dot, dash, pause can't quickly be encoded with simple tap and pause.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Tap and scrape. Or taptap for dit, tap tap for dah.
    - Retric 3y ago
      I realize why you think this might work but understand people went with a new system for multiple reasons. First the goal is for the guards not to hear what your doing or just to hear seemingly random tapping. Scrape etc means your producing two different types and levels of noise making patterns more obvious and it's harder to control who can hear. Also what matters is time not the number of taps. One common encoding was 1 to 5 taps then pause followed by 1 to 5 taps and another pause for each letter thus averaging 6 taps and two short pauses per letter. Morse code generally means 4 dots or dashes per letter so now you have 4 to 8 taps ie ~6 taps, but far more pauses in alternate encodings.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        I'm not sure the guards would be so stupid as to not know what the tapping means. It may be hard to tell where the tapping is coming from, though. > averaging 6 taps and two short pauses per letter This would be true if the letters are used with equal frequency. But they are not. Morse encoding uses short sequences for more common letters and longer ones for less common letters. For example, Morse E is dot, and T is dash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:International_Morse_Code.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:Interna... For tap code, E is 5-1 and T is 4-4. https://www.inverse.com/article/11684-the-flash-and-tap-codes-a-brief-history-of-how-vietnam-pows-communicated https://www.inverse.com/article/11684-the-flash-and-tap-code... The advantage to tap code is it is easier to learn. Which, of course, also makes it easier for the screws to learn it and "tap" into those communications.
wrs 3y ago
This reminds me of the fantastic Connections Museum in Seattle [0] that maintains historical telephone switching equipment in (mostly) working condition with an all-volunteer staff. When I first visited, I was surprised to see that all the volunteers were about half the age I expected! You can see some of them on the YouTube channel [1]. [0] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ [1] https://youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum https://youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Whenever I see this my joy is tempered by mourning for the loss of the living computer museum to accountants eating at the corpse of Paul Allen.
  - oldnetguy 3y ago
    The living computer museum was a great place to visit, but it is not the accounts eating away. It is his sister.
  - wrs 3y ago
    I’m with you! It was my dream to retire and become one of the old guys in lab coats repairing stuff at Living Computers. Maybe they’ll get that sorted out and I’ll still get a chance.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Not likely. As mentioned in a parallel comment it’s partially that Jody Allen, his sister, doesn’t value the geek culture in the least and partially that the owner, Vulcan, is run by MBA accountants that are finally unshackled by their eccentric nerd funder. Between them they’re seeking to put the nerd passions of Allen to death and focus squarely on playing money managers. There appears to be little respecting of his legacy or wishes in his estate management and a lot of avarice.
- iamjaredwalters 3y ago
whartung 3y ago
Does anyone know how the telegraph lines were architected? Did you have segments of shared stations, where a message sent from one station was echoed to all the connected stations, with one responsible for forwarding messages across segments? Just curious what the path of a message from, say, New York to Chicago was.
- dbcurtis 3y ago
  You raise an interesting question, but note that this article is about KPH, a radio telegraph station, not land-line telegraphy. I don't know much about your actual question though.... I know that there were "repeaters" in the lines, basically a relay with a local battery, on longer lines. I know railroads had their own network of telegraph circuits between stations, with poles along the track right-of-way. I know that the first trans-Atlantic telegraph wires was what led to research into basic transmission line theory, since the first cables only allowed pitifully slow signalling and the reason why was not well understood. If you look at old photographs of rail road right-of-way, you see 6 or 8 wires or more, so they obviously were running multiple telegraph circuits along the line. In passing, I will note the trivia that land-line Morse (the original) and international radio-telegraph Morse is different in a few characters, because some of the character "clacks" become difficult to distinguish as "beeps" under noisy conditions. You have successfully nerd-sniped me today, well played.
- Animats 3y ago
  For big operations such as Western Union, it was store and forward. Links were point to point links with messages hand-copied to paper at relay stations. Paper messages were sorted by hand, and re-sent by outgoing operators. Large buildings with large staffs were required.[1] KPH was such a relay station, where messages went from land lines to radio and back. Low-traffic lines and railroads tended to have many stations on one wire. Similarly, ships could talk to each other by radio. To get into the interconnected system, you had to go through a gateway to a commercial network, and there would be charges incurred at that point. [1] https://www.wondersofworldengineering.com/telegraph_office.html https://www.wondersofworldengineering.com/telegraph_office.h...
  - 3y ago
Stratoscope 3y ago
Tangentially related, Hyundai has a nice little tribute to Morse code in their Ioniq 5 and 6. On the steering wheel, where they traditionally placed the stylized "H" Hyundai logo, there are just four dots: • • • • Which is Morse code for the letter "H"!
slipperybeluga 3y ago
[dead]
JJMcJ 3y ago
The Jeremiah O'Brien, while docked in San Francisco, actually is in running order. Once in a while there are cruises around the Bay. It was at the 50th anniversary memorial for D-Day, steaming off the Normandy shore.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  So I've tried to get aboard for a tour more than once, but from what I gather it's not really something you just casually do. When I called them (standing at the locked door) they said they just run tours whenever possible, which may or may not happen on any day. I'm assuming you need to know someone involved with the museum to get aboard.
femto 3y ago
Morse code lives on in the form of Station Identification [1]. By law, radio stations are required to periodically transmit identifying information. The announcer on a commercial radio station will typically say it, but there are lots of Land Mobile Radio stations out there that don't have a person in the loop. For an unattended station, by far the cheapest and easiest thing to do is program the base station to periodically transmit the station ID as a burst of Morse code. It's not that many years since I wrote code to transmit Morse, that code being embedded in radio base stations that are still being sold. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#Identification_on_other_types_of_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#Identif...
- lsh123 3y ago
  Same is true for aviation nav aids: VOR, ILS, … stations transmit their name in Morse code for identification.
  - larrysalibra 3y ago
    Same is true for maritime racon navigation marks which transmit a morse code letter as identification in response to the reception of a radar pulse...the morse code is then visible on the radar display. We had to learn morse code for Hong Kong's "grade 1 pleasure vessel certificate of competency" -> a credential required to operate pleasure vessels greater than 15 meters in length. It's pretty easy to pick up and there are a few phone mobile phone apps that make learning morse code fun.
firesteelrain 3y ago
Why do those pictures look like they were created with DALL-E?

149 points by fortran77 3y ago

ddol 3y ago

KPH receiving station is 45 miles north of San Francisco, without bridge traffic you can make it in a little over an hour. My father-in-law was an engineer in the navy and loved seeing the morse & radio equipment. But the trip was fun for all the family; the driveway up to the reviving station building is lined with Monterey cypress trees, which have grown into a tunnel. [0] It’s a beautiful scene, my wife and mother-in-law were really taken aback. [0] https://www.nps.gov/places/point-reyes-cypress-tree-tunnel.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/point-reyes-cypress-tree-tunnel.h...

cylinder714 3y ago
The Maritime Radio Historical Society, KPH's website: https://www.radiomarine.org/ https://www.radiomarine.org/ The volunteers fire up the transmitters every Saturday; the schedule is on the website.

1st1 3y ago

Direct link to photographer's site with photos: https://www.annhermesphoto.com/radio-squirrels https://www.annhermesphoto.com/radio-squirrels

resters 3y ago

Don't forget that morse is still used by amateur radio operators worldwide.

jmclnx 3y ago
I am curious if its use is dropping off. I heard knowing morse is no longer a requirement to get a license.
- vetrom 3y ago
  It is no longer a requirement, but there is a significant amount of amateur spectrum where CW (morse) is the preferred or only permitted modulation.
- dbcurtis 3y ago
  It is no longer a license requirement. It is still used for casual contacts by people that enjoy it. It is used for various things that fall under the banner of "radiosport" -- for my part I enjoy Morse-code-only radio contests. It is used for identification beacons for repeaters or propagation beacons. And for radio experimenters, a Morse code transmitter makes a great first project since it is so simple and is foundational to everything that comes after it. Pretty much any transmitter that you build is just extra stuff on top of a Morse code transmitter in one form or another. Morse code has a distinct signal-to-noise ratio advantage over any other simple modulation scheme, since the receiving filter can be so narrow, and 100% of the power is going into the carrier any time you are key-down. This is why Morse code is good for propagation beacons and also for other experiments. There are, of course, modern error-correcting codes that beat it, but then both the transmission and reception become much more complex. (See FT8 for a currently popular weak-signal mode). I view Morse code radio contests much like a sail boat racing. Nobody moves containers of goods from China to LA on sail boats. But lots of people enjoy a good boat race on a sunny afternoon, and enjoy keeping the old marlin-spike seamanship skills alive. Likewise, ftp is a much smarter way to move a 3GB file from London to SF than using Morse code, but that doesn't mean that Morse code isn't good humor during a weekend radio contest.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  One area Morse code is popular is using limited radios. Morse code works well with tiny (phone sized), low power radios. There is challenge called SOTA where hike to top of mountain and make contacts. It is much easier to take small radio and Morse paddle than the bigger radios needed for voice. There are low-power data modes, but then have to carry computer along and deal with software.
- uint8_t 3y ago
  In absolute terms, probably, but some are declaring a renaissance associated with the increasing popularity in portable operation. Summits On The Air (SOTA) in particular favors lightweight transmitters. CW is such an efficient mode, in terms of speed, reach and circuit design that it is worth learning Morse for that single use case. Personally, once I gained some proficiency with CW I realized that it is an enjoyable pursuit in and of itself, so now while not climbing mountains I stay on the low parts of the band and exchange postcards with octogenarians and I couldn't be happier.

karaterobot 3y ago

It makes me happy to know these guys are out there. I like that they've got a thing they care about and are dedicated to. Sounds like the ship this station communicates with, the S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien, is a restored Liberty ship used for day cruises. I'd love to know about the relationship between the (presumably) WWII naval history nerds who restored that ship and the Morse code nerds who operate this station.

cylinder714 3y ago
The S.S. Red Oak Victory, a Victory ship built in Richmond, California, is now a museum ship berthed near where it was built. Its radio room, operated by an amateur radio club, is open on Sundays. https://www.qsl.net/redoakarc/ https://www.qsl.net/redoakarc/

dayofthedaleks 3y ago

Nice to see reliable terrestrial radio services chugging along with orbital services becoming less assured. I was recently pleased to see eLORAN is gaining momentum to fill the void left by LORAN-C's shutdown in 2010. 8 meter resolution through radio triangulation is pretty impressive.

jodrellblank 3y ago

Ignoring the Morse Code radio station, in the context of those banks of instruments and controls... each individual readout can be done cheaper and more reliably in software, but doing everything in software means one or two LCD screens. Will it ever be wall-sized banks of screens covered in eInk displays as standard industrial controls? Will it skip straight past that to Augmented Reality?

ruined 3y ago
through-hole components and physical controls are standard, durable, and maintainable in a way that microelectronics will never be i see small touchscreens on devices where maintenance doesn't matter but if you need a complex bespoke interface that's durable and lasts for years, you will use a physical control surface made of off-the-shelf parts
- doubloon 3y ago
  Had an interesting conversation with someone who used to run a radio shack and now works for one of the few remaining 'screwdriver shops' (PC shop). If I understood it, her theory was basically that radio shack wouldn't come back because the size of components nowadays is too small. And its funny you mention touchscreen. Because I bought a mechanical switch from her to do a DIY Mod on a 20 year old car. It was pretty simple and worked well. But this car also had a touch screen that was extremely anti-DIY friendly. These screens tend to get 'burnt' by the sun after 20+ years and stop working correctly. The typical fix for this screen is complete replacement or extremely complex repair via mail. Parts won't be available forever and the whole thing is closed source and incredibly hard to reverse engineer.

WalterBright 3y ago

I patented a scheme where cell phones could communicate with morse code. The idea was to put a rocker switch on the phone, one side for dit and the other for dah. Then, you could text people without needing to look at the display. You could be texting people at a meeting with your hand in your pocket. The phone would convert the morse to text to transmit to your penpal. You could also opt to receive morse by having the phone vibrate in morse so you could stealthily receive texts, too!

eastbound 3y ago
Cool. But the boss could subscribe too. Is it encrypted? Are there standards for morse code encryption?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The morse app would just convert it to/from text, and then the text would be sent by whatever app you would be keyboarding input to.
nosrepa 3y ago
You can do that even now! Gboard has had Morse as an option for years.
- kqr 3y ago
  But almost always with these things it's not iambic/semi-automatic, which it should be to be somewhat useful. I have been looking for morse code keyboards for smartphones and I have only found one that was good, and it was an early iPhone thing that hasn't worked on modern iPhones for years.
davchana 3y ago
On older nokia phones un 2000-2004 (when I had them), I could text as long as I know I am on the typing screen. I knew pressing 2 three times gives you c, one 3 gives you D, # changes case, 0 gives you space. Two zeros gives you dot. I remember texting a lot while phone is under the table, or simply in pocket.

WalterBright 3y ago

Much more efficient than the "tap code" prisoners re-invent.

Retric 3y ago
POW's who knew more code still resorted to a new "tap code" because dot, dash, pause can't quickly be encoded with simple tap and pause.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Tap and scrape. Or taptap for dit, tap tap for dah.
  - Retric 3y ago
    I realize why you think this might work but understand people went with a new system for multiple reasons. First the goal is for the guards not to hear what your doing or just to hear seemingly random tapping. Scrape etc means your producing two different types and levels of noise making patterns more obvious and it's harder to control who can hear. Also what matters is time not the number of taps. One common encoding was 1 to 5 taps then pause followed by 1 to 5 taps and another pause for each letter thus averaging 6 taps and two short pauses per letter. Morse code generally means 4 dots or dashes per letter so now you have 4 to 8 taps ie ~6 taps, but far more pauses in alternate encodings.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I'm not sure the guards would be so stupid as to not know what the tapping means. It may be hard to tell where the tapping is coming from, though. > averaging 6 taps and two short pauses per letter This would be true if the letters are used with equal frequency. But they are not. Morse encoding uses short sequences for more common letters and longer ones for less common letters. For example, Morse E is dot, and T is dash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:International_Morse_Code.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:Interna... For tap code, E is 5-1 and T is 4-4. https://www.inverse.com/article/11684-the-flash-and-tap-codes-a-brief-history-of-how-vietnam-pows-communicated https://www.inverse.com/article/11684-the-flash-and-tap-code... The advantage to tap code is it is easier to learn. Which, of course, also makes it easier for the screws to learn it and "tap" into those communications.

wrs 3y ago

This reminds me of the fantastic Connections Museum in Seattle [0] that maintains historical telephone switching equipment in (mostly) working condition with an all-volunteer staff. When I first visited, I was surprised to see that all the volunteers were about half the age I expected! You can see some of them on the YouTube channel [1]. [0] https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ [1] https://youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum https://youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Whenever I see this my joy is tempered by mourning for the loss of the living computer museum to accountants eating at the corpse of Paul Allen.
- oldnetguy 3y ago
  The living computer museum was a great place to visit, but it is not the accounts eating away. It is his sister.
- wrs 3y ago
  I’m with you! It was my dream to retire and become one of the old guys in lab coats repairing stuff at Living Computers. Maybe they’ll get that sorted out and I’ll still get a chance.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Not likely. As mentioned in a parallel comment it’s partially that Jody Allen, his sister, doesn’t value the geek culture in the least and partially that the owner, Vulcan, is run by MBA accountants that are finally unshackled by their eccentric nerd funder. Between them they’re seeking to put the nerd passions of Allen to death and focus squarely on playing money managers. There appears to be little respecting of his legacy or wishes in his estate management and a lot of avarice.
iamjaredwalters 3y ago

whartung 3y ago

Does anyone know how the telegraph lines were architected? Did you have segments of shared stations, where a message sent from one station was echoed to all the connected stations, with one responsible for forwarding messages across segments? Just curious what the path of a message from, say, New York to Chicago was.

dbcurtis 3y ago
You raise an interesting question, but note that this article is about KPH, a radio telegraph station, not land-line telegraphy. I don't know much about your actual question though.... I know that there were "repeaters" in the lines, basically a relay with a local battery, on longer lines. I know railroads had their own network of telegraph circuits between stations, with poles along the track right-of-way. I know that the first trans-Atlantic telegraph wires was what led to research into basic transmission line theory, since the first cables only allowed pitifully slow signalling and the reason why was not well understood. If you look at old photographs of rail road right-of-way, you see 6 or 8 wires or more, so they obviously were running multiple telegraph circuits along the line. In passing, I will note the trivia that land-line Morse (the original) and international radio-telegraph Morse is different in a few characters, because some of the character "clacks" become difficult to distinguish as "beeps" under noisy conditions. You have successfully nerd-sniped me today, well played.
Animats 3y ago
For big operations such as Western Union, it was store and forward. Links were point to point links with messages hand-copied to paper at relay stations. Paper messages were sorted by hand, and re-sent by outgoing operators. Large buildings with large staffs were required.[1] KPH was such a relay station, where messages went from land lines to radio and back. Low-traffic lines and railroads tended to have many stations on one wire. Similarly, ships could talk to each other by radio. To get into the interconnected system, you had to go through a gateway to a commercial network, and there would be charges incurred at that point. [1] https://www.wondersofworldengineering.com/telegraph_office.html https://www.wondersofworldengineering.com/telegraph_office.h...
- 3y ago

Stratoscope 3y ago

Tangentially related, Hyundai has a nice little tribute to Morse code in their Ioniq 5 and 6. On the steering wheel, where they traditionally placed the stylized "H" Hyundai logo, there are just four dots: • • • • Which is Morse code for the letter "H"!

slipperybeluga 3y ago

[dead]

JJMcJ 3y ago

The Jeremiah O'Brien, while docked in San Francisco, actually is in running order. Once in a while there are cruises around the Bay. It was at the 50th anniversary memorial for D-Day, steaming off the Normandy shore.

sidewndr46 3y ago
So I've tried to get aboard for a tour more than once, but from what I gather it's not really something you just casually do. When I called them (standing at the locked door) they said they just run tours whenever possible, which may or may not happen on any day. I'm assuming you need to know someone involved with the museum to get aboard.

femto 3y ago

Morse code lives on in the form of Station Identification [1]. By law, radio stations are required to periodically transmit identifying information. The announcer on a commercial radio station will typically say it, but there are lots of Land Mobile Radio stations out there that don't have a person in the loop. For an unattended station, by far the cheapest and easiest thing to do is program the base station to periodically transmit the station ID as a burst of Morse code. It's not that many years since I wrote code to transmit Morse, that code being embedded in radio base stations that are still being sold. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#Identification_on_other_types_of_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_identification#Identif...

lsh123 3y ago
Same is true for aviation nav aids: VOR, ILS, … stations transmit their name in Morse code for identification.
- larrysalibra 3y ago
  Same is true for maritime racon navigation marks which transmit a morse code letter as identification in response to the reception of a radar pulse...the morse code is then visible on the radar display. We had to learn morse code for Hong Kong's "grade 1 pleasure vessel certificate of competency" -> a credential required to operate pleasure vessels greater than 15 meters in length. It's pretty easy to pick up and there are a few phone mobile phone apps that make learning morse code fun.

firesteelrain 3y ago

Why do those pictures look like they were created with DALL-E?