In article ,
Zaphon B. wrote:
I made mention of the fact earlier that I was
hearing Morse Code that seemed to
be transmitted so fast that it was almost like it was some other form of
communication. So questions.

Are many people out there able to listen and decode that **** on the fly and
understand it or are they going through
software programs to decode the stuff.

There's legacy stuff, like the station IDs and traffic lists from
maritime shore stations, the IDs for maritime and aeronautical
navigation beacons, and probably tactical military stuff just
used for practice. But it's basically obsolete. And hams, of
course.

But if you can afford a computer to receive it, you can use some other
modulation method that's far superior. Most maritime stuff, that
hasn't gone to satellite, is TOR (Telex over Radio).

If the home office wants to contact a ship at sea that's equipped with
an Inmarsat satellite terminal, they just call them on the telephone,
send a fax, or an email.

AND

(I know this will sound stupid) but is
there actually someone sitting out there
hammering this stuff out by hand, like in the
old westerns or is it machine made?

They don't use hand keys, there are automatic keyboards, or semi-automatic
keyers (buzzword: bugs) that speed things up by timing out the dots and
dashes. Or computers.

if machine made why? Why are people still sending info with Morse Code?
Haven't we
sort of moved beyond that, if you know what I mean??

Yup, that's why only hams really still use it.

Even 40-50 years ago, most businesses shifted over to using the Telex
or TWX services, where an operator in their communication center
would send a message on a teleprinter through the world wide telegraph
networks or direct dial through the phone system.

Even RTTY seems to have gone away. (Radio TeleTYpe). Long before
computers ran communications, there were printing telegraph systems.
Most commonly (for English) they used a 5 bit code, which sent upper
case letter, or the numbers and special characters. (They used codes
for shift and unshift, Caps Lock in modern terminology). Sent at, by
modern standards, at pathetically slow speeds of 42.something, 50, or 75
bits per second using Frequency Shift Keying. Back 15 or 20 years ago,
you could pick up a tweedling signal that jumped between two tones.
(received in SSB mode on your receiver). If you had the equipment,
a Terminal Unit, (the demodulator half of a modem) and a teleprinter
that worked with the code, or later a micro-controller decoder box, or
computer with software, you could read, literally, the signals.

These included weather reports, (in a cryptic coding system), traffic for
telegraph systems (Western Union) between countries that didn't have wire
connections (US to Cuba), and news services. The same text that was being
printed out in newsrooms at news papers and radio stations around the
country was also being sent by shortwave to the more remote subscribers.
In the clear. (But, aside from the weather data, none of this stuff was
public information. They could go after you for violating regulations
or copyright for giving it to a third party).

Last time I bothered, all that was out there was the North Korean
news service. And the maritime TOR system that links ships to
whatever is left of the Telex system. And a lot of encrypted
stuff (probably military comms to small bases too small for more
reliable and high bandwidth links).

Mark Zenier Washington State resident