In article . net, "Dwight
Stewart" writes:

"Dick Carroll" wrote:

If you only had but a small portion of a clue you'd know that
most habd-sent CW not only *can* but WILL "thwart" most
consumer grade computer receive programs. I rather suspect
some more sophisticated writings do a lot better.

The Apple DOS 3.3 disk (early 1980's) came with a simple program, included
as a programming example, that did a fine job of copying code/CW. I hooked
an unused Apple II Plus to a Kenwood R2000 shortwave receiver and used that
program to copy code for several months. It rarely missed characters and
almost never missed enough characters to make the message unreadable. The
only times that program failed was when the signal I was trying to copy was
too deeply buried in the background noise or when multiple stations were
transmitting on the same frequency.

I haven't purchased a program like that recently, but surely they've
gotten better over the years. Is that not the case?

They have, but the mighty morsemen consider such to be desecrations
of the will of the old radio gods.

Perhaps you missed a back-and-forth I had in here with Ed Hare on a
programmer acquaintence who wrote an adaptive morse code cognition
program (on a standard PC, top of the line then, middle-level now) which
could compensate very well for variations in spacing, dot-dash lengths,
whatever "swing" is (a subjective term to morsemen), tone, rate, and
so forth. To him it was an intellectual challenge.

Some trials with my receiver and a long-wire antenna at his place
showed that there was damn little USE of morse code anywhere on HF
except in the amateur bands. There's no real market for such a thing
and the successful adaptive morse code cognition program remained
just a satisfying (to the programmer) intellectual exercise.

LHA