Dave wrote:

"Michael Coslo" wrote in message
...

Doug McLaren wrote:

In article ,
Michael Coslo wrote:

| I hear lots of Hams declare that Morse code is a binary mode.
|
| It is most certainly not.

It most certainly is.
...
| Is the space between characters a "0"? and the Dih a "1"? Oh wait,

what

| is the Dah then? Oh, and what about the space between words?

Try looking at it at a lower level -- stop looking at the dits and dahs.

At a lower level, anything is digital when you look at it that way. A
photograph, digital audio, whatever.

If Morse code was really digital, there would be no need to have a lower
level


Morse code is either on or off. 1 or 0. You're either emitting a
signal, or you're not -- there's no in between.

Ahh, so the space between the dits and dahs means nothing? There is
definitely an "in between" It is how we determine what the words a

..... is that the number 5, or is it HE or is it SI, or IS or EH?


Looking up what binary means -- http://www.answers.com/binary --

bi na ry (b'n-r) pronunciation
adj.
1. Characterized by or consisting of two parts or components;

twofold.

At the lowest level, there's only two components -- on or off, tone or
no tone. It certainly fits the definition.

Considering that `tone' = 1 and `no tone' = 0 ...

Longer periods of 1's = dahs
Shorter periods of 1's = dits
Short period of 0's = space between a dit or a dah.
Longer period of 0's = space between characters.
Even longer period of 0's = space between words.

You have just described more than two states.


It's not a particularly efficient binary code, but it *is*, at the
lowest level, binary -- there's only two states. It's certainly not
analog, or tinary, or ...

Disagree. It isn't analog for sure, but with only a 1 and a zero, it
cant be described. Trying to describe it with 1's and 0's means that you
have to translate it. That longer dah, is not a 1. It cannot be the same
thing as the short dit. If both of them are 1's, the analogy fails


Now, to be fair, at a higher level, you could say it has four states
-- dit, dah, space between character, space between word. Which would
be quadrary (is that the right word? is it even a real word?) But
that doesn't mean it can't be binary at another level at the same
time.

| It isn't binary, and the way our noodles process it isn't binary.

I'm not sure that the way our brain processes it is relevant. RTTY is
binary (or do you disagree there too?) and yet our brain hardly
processes it's output in a binary manner.

| It's not binary.

If you say so. I doubt I've convinced you, but it's really all a
matter of how you look at it, and if you insist on looking at it in
only one way, nobody's going to convince you otherwise.

I'm saying that in order to have Morse code be binary, you have to
digitize it, so to speak. You have to have a clocking action, and a dah
has to either be something other than a "1" if the dit is considered a
"1". If it was truly digital, you wouldn't have to do any of that.


even the 'real' digital modes have a clocking action. how else do you know
when one character ends and another starts? the one big oddity of morse is
that the characters are unequal lengths so it is not easy to make a simple
clock mechanism to decode them like it is for baudot or ascii codes. then
of course another oddity is that it is often sent by hand (or at least it
used to be) so the timing varies even within a short message making it even
harder to decode mechanically. however hscw and very low speed or coherent
cw are normally machine encoded and decoded and rely on very exact timing.

I agree Dave. I'm a little familiar with the digital world. The
oddities of Morse that you mention are both the blessing and curse of
the mode. No argument on the ability to convert Morse to digital, and
while the machine sent stuff is not too hard to translate, it is amazing
what the human mind can do when recieving a signal from a person with a
bad fist.

- Mike KB3EIA -