What Morse Code Taught Me About Music Recording

This topic may seem like a stretch in a podcast about music recording, but using Morse code on Amateur Radio taught me quite a bit about hearing acuity. And my experience building devices for my hobby taught me a lot about electronics, circuit design, and construction.

From my first exposure to Morse code from interference from a RCA Coastal Marine station in New Jersey as a kid, to learning the code and using it for over 50 years, the code has been part of my life. Although I do not have much time to use it these days, it is a skill I try to utilize when I can.

I also taught myself the original Morse code, as developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1830s, which is quite different from the modern code.

This episode has actual code segments to illustrate my points, including a recreation of the cacophonous jumble of code signals I had to deal with before I could afford more advanced equipment.

Interacting with people from all over the country and all over the world via Morse code also taught me things about communicating with different cultures and backgrounds.

Special thanks to Ian Alexander, voiceover artist, former radio broadcaster, and second engineer on most of the recording projects I have done over the past 35 years.

As an illustration of one of the points I make in this podcast, I purposely recorded this episode without any written material or notes. Previous episodes have been either completely scripted (usually based on something I had written for another outlet), or at least outlined. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think for most episodes I will stick with scripting them in detail.

As you might imagine, this episode has a lot of edits, some of which are not as smooth as I would like.

Technical details: I used an AEA KU4 directional ribbon microphone for this episode, instead of the usual AEA R44 I have used on most of the previous shows. The KU4 goes into a D.W. Fearn VT-2 Vacuum Tube Microphone Preamplifier, a Merging Technologies Hapi converter, and was recorded in Pyramix. A D.W. Fearn VT-7 Compressor was used on the mix buss, but there is no equalization at all.

email: dwfearn@dwfearn.com
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm Doug Fern , and this is my take on music recording. I was fortunate growing up. I spent my summers at the New Jersey Shore. My grandparents had a cottage there and it was in a pretty remote location going north or south. There was the equivalent of maybe four blocks before you came across another house. To the east was the Atlantic Ocean, and to the west was a scattering of houses till you came to a wide bay and across that water was the mainland of New Jersey. A lot of people would consider that very desolate, and to a certain extent it was. We had electricity and running water, but no telephone and no television service, and of course it would be decades before the internet arrived, but we did have an AM radio that sat on the end of the mantlepiece in our living room. We didn't listen to it much. There was only one station we could pick up in Atlantic City, but we would often turn it on to get the news or more probably the latest weather forecast.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Police department

Speaker 1: 1:12

Sometimes when the radio is on the broadcast would be interrupted by this blast of mors coat .

Speaker 2: 1:19

The forecast for this afternoon calls for another warm day. There may be a few clouds late this afternoon, but rain is unlikely . Today's high temperature will be 87 degrees and tonight's low temperature .

Speaker 1: 1:32

I was fascinated by this code but had no idea what it was, so I asked around and nobody seemed to really know, although everybody in the neighborhood knew what I was talking about. Finally, I got an answer or sort of an answer from the chief of police. It was our neighbor and also our plumber, and he told me that it was a radio station in Tuckerton, New Jersey that was used for communicating with ships at sea. The station wasn't actually in Tuckerton, but in a small town called West Creek. Tuckerton was a few miles south, but Tuckerton had a long history as a site for radio communications. Going back to the Marconi days, actually, the radio station was directly across the bay from our house, probably less than 10 miles. In fact, I could see their tower from our house. I later learned there was part of a series of stations that RCA established in order to provide a communication service for ships. So the next thing I did, which is what I did whenever I wanted to find out anything, is I went to the library and I found a bunch of books on Morris Code and learned some interesting things at that time. Morris Code was used extensively by the military for ship communications, for communication with aircraft and by radio amateurs and in a wired format by the telegraph services and the railroads. I also learned that there were two different Morriss codes. The original code was developed by Alfred Vale and Samuel Morrise for use with their new invention, the Telegraph. By the way, the Telegraph was the first practical use of electricity ever, and the original Morse code was based on some observations that Alfred Veil made of how printers organized their type in cases for typesetting for printing. He noticed that the most commonly used letter E had the biggest bin in the case. While other letters like Q and j, which were used much less frequently, had little tiny bins off to the side. Alfred Vale used this information in order to construct a code that put the most common letters as the simplest ones and the least often used letters as more complicated, longer characters. This code prevailed from about 1840 when the Telegraph became a practical service until around the turn of the 20th century. When wireless radio telegraphy became practical on a wired circuit, there was no interference to speak of, so the code could be actually rather complex and still be easy to copy, but for radio communications where signals were often weak, there was interference, static crashes and so on. The code had to be simplified somewhat to make it a little more robust. At that point, all services that used Morse code shifted to what was called International Morse code except for the railroads and some telegraph services, which continued to use the original code called American Mors . One of the books I got outta the library had a table that showed how the characters were formed illustrated graphically with dots and dashes. I brought that back with me and tried to listen to the code again, it was intermittent, so it wasn't there all the time, but when it was, I would try to figure out what they were saying. There were actually two different transmissions that we could pick up on that am radio. One of them was just a general call up announcing that the station was available and the frequencies where they'd be listening, that was all sent by a machine. They used what they called a code wheel, which was just a mechanical device to develop the code characters, but when it came time to send actual messages to the ships at sea, it was sent by hand. The call up code was centered about 20 words per minute, which is pretty fast for somebody just trying to figure out what they're saying. Fortunately, the call letters of the radio station WSC were repeated over and over and over again, and that allowed me to figure out what it was. However, when they sent an actual message to a ship, it was pretty indecipherable. I noticed right away that it sounded different than the call up , which was mechanically generated. This hand sent code had a distinctive character to it . Well, for one thing, it was much too fast for me to figure out what was going on, so I quickly gave up, but it wasn't too long after that that I learned that the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia was offering a course that prepared students for taking the test for the amateur radio license. Back in those days, the entry level license called a novice class license had many restrictions, but it was very easy to obtain. But like all the licenses, it required you to demonstrate that you could send and receive Morris Code. You only had to show that you could copy code and send it at five words a minute, which is excruciatingly slow, but it gave you an opportunity to learn the code and get on the air with many restrictions and build up your experience so you could pass one of the more uh , advanced tests. Here's an example of what five words per minute sounds like. That's pretty slow. The class at the Franklin Institute taught you not only the code but also the theory portion, the written portion of the test you would have to pass, which was about one-third electrical theory, one-third rules and regulations, and one third operating practices. Every Saturday, I would take a trolley in the subway into Philadelphia and go to the Franklin Institute, which didn't open until 10 o'clock, but our class began around nine. It was in a room on the third floor, no windows, and it just had one large green table. Around the table were chairs for about a dozen students, and at each position there was a hand telegraph key. In the middle of the table was a gray metal box with a loudspeaker and some vacuum tubes, and this provided a tone. When you press the key, any key at any position could create the sound at the head of the table sat the instructor, and this is where I was really fortunate because the instructor was very proficient at Morse code and loved to use the code, and he instilled that love of the code into the students, or at least those that were receptive to it. Originally, I thought the code was gonna be a burdensome thing that I'd have to get through in order to get the license and ultimately be able to talk to people by voice, but I soon found out that the code was pretty interesting. We learned about five letters each week starting out with the simplest ones like the E, which is a single dot or a T, which is a single dash or a, which is a dot and a dash. Eventually, we had enough characters that we could start sending simple words and all the students were encouraged to come up with a word and send it to the class. At the end of the course, we were ready to take the test. I took the test in mid-December, but it wasn't until sometime in January that my license arrived in the mail. I was excited to get on the air, but I was 12 years old and I did not have a lot of money to spend on equipment, so the first transmitter I had was homemade. It consisted of two vacuum tubes. It put out about five watts of power, which wasn't very much, but it was enough to make contacts locally. It was difficult to build a receiver, so I had to buy one that was commercially built. The state-of-the-art receivers of that day cost about the equivalent of $7,000 in today's dollars, a sum of money that was inconceivable to a 12-year-old, so I had to be content with a 20-year-old used receiver. Now, at this point, you're probably wondering what this has to do with the recording, but here's what I learned with this very simple receiver that I had. It was not able to separate all the different signals and isolate one to listen to. You heard many signals simultaneously. More sophisticated receivers had fancy filters that would narrow down the bandwidth, so you only heard one or at most a couple of stations at the same time. But for me, the goal was separating these stations in my mind. Here's a recreation using modern equipment that gives you a sense of what it sounded like on this old receiver. What you had to do was focus in on a particular signal and follow it with your brain and ignore all the others. You don't have to know Morris code to give this a try. Just pick out one of the tones that's going on there and try to follow it and ignore all the rest. You'll notice that summerfest or summer slower, the the pitches are different. Some of them are stronger, some of them are weaker, but all those things gave you clues on which one to follow. In addition, there were other characteristics which helped you to follow one or the other. Some of the signals had sharp clicks at the beginning and end of each element of the code. Others of the signals drifted in frequency throughout their transmission. Some signals change pitch during each element of the character, a characteristic called chirp. Sometimes a signal could be so vanishingly weak. It was almost imaginary. It was still possible to copy that signal, but it took a lot of concentration. You can see how this ear training was really helpful for a recording career. It made it very easy for me later on when I started recording music to zero in on just one instrument in a mix. I could listen to the bass all the way through a song and mentally block out everything else and just hear the baseline , all the notes that were playing, any mistakes, any characteristics of it that weren't right. Same with any other instrument. Amateur radio exists because of the skills that the operators developed, proved to be useful to society during World War I and especially World War ii . The skill communicators from the amateur radio community were very valuable to the military. In fact, many radio amateurs were recruited in order to train operators for the military. Many amateur radio training materials were used in order to teach people the code radio theory and communication skills. From its beginning, amateur radio operators were experimenters and communicators. Many of the characteristics of radio waves were discovered by radio amateurs. A good example occurred right after World War I . Prior to that, the radio spectrum was pretty much wide open. Anybody could build a transmitter and get on the air. That meant you had commercial services, the military shipboard operators and radio amateurs all using the same frequencies all interfering with each other. At the end of World War I , the military wanted to eliminate amateur radio altogether, but fortunately they came up with a compromise. They relegated the radio amateurs to short wave frequencies, which were considered useless for communications, but soon radio amateurs discovered that you could cover vast distances with very low power under certain circumstances on these short waves. Soon, the amateur radio operators were relegated to a few narrow slices of spectrum in the short wave range in order to continue their communications. From the beginning, amateur radio operators used their stations in order to provide a service to the public with messages that could be sent from one point to another. By law, these messages could not be for commercial purposes, but only for personal communications between individuals. Remember, this is in the days when even telephones weren't all that common and any other kind of electronic communications was extremely expensive, so most of these messages were passed between. People were pretty frivolous in nature. However, it did provide training for the operators, so if there was ever an emergency situation, a disaster caused by weather was typical. Then the radio amateurs were there to provide communications when the telephone lines were inoperative. In order to carry these messages, organized networks of stations were established. They met daily usually in the evening, and there was a hierarchy of nets that started at a local level and eventually worked their way up to a national level, and messages could be passed between amateur radio operators up to a higher level net in order to get it through. Eventually to the other end of the circuit where it was brought back down to the local level and then generally delivered by an amateur radio operator closest to the recipient. This worked really well. Of course, most of the time it was frivolous stuff, but during an emergency, it could be the only communications available. During the earthquake in Alaska in 1964, all communications to Alaska had been cut off. Almost all the communications that originated from Alaska during that time was carried by amateur radio operators. I can remember clearly getting messages for people in my home town and calling them up on the telephone to let them know that a relative or friend was reporting that they were safe. Of course not all the messages were that reassuring, and if it was a serious injury or death, we turned those over to the Red Cross for delivery. Today with cell phones in the internet and easy global communications, it's easy for somebody to get a message through as long as all those circuits are working properly still, amateur radio provides a lot of emergency communications when when it's really needed. To me, one of the most valuable aspects of doing this service called traffic handling was working with really good operators night after night. I no longer have the time to participate in these networks, but it was great training for me in several aspects. For one thing, it showed me how good operating practices and excellently sent code could make a huge difference in the ability to carry this traffic. It also meant working cooperatively with a lot of people, people all over the country, people from very different backgrounds than mine. This was all good for me and learning how to deal with a wide variety of people, a skill that I found useful in the studio. Some of the people that I worked with on these networks were retired railroad operators, and of course they were using international mors , the more common code on the air for handling their traffic, but often after that was done, they'd go off on their own and communicate in American Mor the old original code . Sometimes I would listen to this and I was just fascinated by it because it was a very different sounding code to my ear. It was much more musical. It required an attention to the rhythm of the characters, not so much just the dots and dashes. So a friend and I and he lived in Canada, decided that we would learn this code. Neither of us had any background in it at all. It took us months of practice until we were proficient at it. It was very confusing because about a third of the characters are different in American Morse than they are in international Morse , and of course you had that aspect of the rhythm of the code. Here's an example of a conversation I had with my friend in Canada using American Morse code . See if you can hear the difference. One thing you'll notice about this code is that there's a lot of dots in it doesn't have as many dashes as the international wars . That makes it faster. In fact, it's about one third faster. This recording was made about 20 years ago, and sadly, my friend at the other end of this conversation has passed away. I'm probably one of the few people left in the world that knows this code, which is a shame because it has a certain beauty to it . Actually, I enjoyed the code so much that even when I upgraded my license and was able to use voice communications, I didn't find it very interesting. I would keep going back to the Morse code portion of the amateur bands and contact people that way. In fact, to this day, I don't use any voice communications in my amateur radio station. I don't have much time to use it, but when I do, it's always with a code. Hand sent code requires a telegraph key, and there's several different versions of this. The simplest one in the one you usually see in depictions of Moore's code is called a hand key , and it's a simple switch that operates moving up and down. By the way, most of the pictures showing the operator using a straight key like that, there's actually not using it properly. It's not a push button. As code speeds increased , it became increasingly difficult to send for long periods of time with a hand key , so a semi-automatic key was developed. This produces a string of dots. When you push a horizontal lever in one direction and the opposite direction, it produces dashes, but you have to make those by hand . This allowed easy operation up to easily 40 or 50 words per minute. A more recent innovation is the electronic key, which similar to the semi-automatic key operates from side to side. It produces dots on one side and dashes on the other. It produces perfectly spaced code as long as you're reasonably close to being accurate. My preference has always been the semi-automatic key, and actually that's the only kind of key you can use for American Mor , the original Morse code. That's because in American Morse , you don't have the standardized length and spacing of characters that you have in international Morse . Once I became relatively proficient at the code, I started to notice some very interesting things, not only about the code itself, but also about the way signals traveled. Each different frequency band had its own characteristics. Some were effective during the day and not at night. Some were effective at night, but not during the day. Some of them were much better in the summer than they were in the winter and vice versa, and almost all of them were affected by where we were in the solar cycle, the number of sunspots that were visible on the sun. When there are a lot of sunspots, the signals travel much farther. When there are very few sunspots, like as I record, this, signals tend to be weak and not travel as far. When you turned on your receiver, it was almost like you opened a door and walked into this room, but you never knew exactly what the room was gonna be like. It was different all the time. Sometimes the room was tiny and there were only a few people in it. Other times the room was gigantic and there were more people there than you could possibly imagine. Sometimes the signals were very strong and easy to copy, and other times there were very weak and difficult to copy. If there was an aurora, the northern or Southern Lights, it would impart a wavery sound to the signals that were being reflected off of it. Radio signals generally only go as far as the similar light beam would go line of sight as it's called. However, certain frequencies in the short wave range can be reflected from a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere several hundred miles above the surface of the earth. This allowed the signals to travel vast distances and enable global communications not only for radio amateurs, but for all the other users of the spectrum. If you had a radio transmitter and receiver that allowed you to hear in between the characters you were sending, it was sometimes possible to hear your own signal being reflected. Radio waves travel with the speed of light, which would make you think that it would be impossible to perceive the amount of time it would take to travel a distance. I can remember times when I could hear my own signal being reflected off of the ionosphere and the earth multiple times, and until it traveled all the way around the world, it would be delayed by about a half to one second, and you could actually hear your own signal with a wavery kind of weakness to it. That was very unusual. Some radio amateurs learned how to bounce their signals off of the trails left by meteors traveling through the atmosphere, and other amateurs used the moon as a giant reflector and directed their signals towards the moon and then back to earth. You might wonder if there's still a place for Morris Code in the 21st century, and remarkably, there still is. One application is in aviation. Every ground-based navigational station identifies itself with Morris Code, and every aeronautical chart shows that code is dots and dashes so that the pilot can make sure he is actually listening to the proper navigational station. Anytime you land in an airliner, the pilot should have identified the landing system by listening to its Morse code. You also hear Morse code used to identify stations that are used by the police and other emergency services, and of course, radio amateurs continue to use Morse code even though it's no longer required to pass the license test. Morse code was the original digital format for communications, but now we have computer generated digital formats that work really well. These digital communication systems are capable of providing reliable communications with vanishing the weak signals. A lot of that technology was developed from the space program for communicating with space probes far from earth, but for many radio amateurs, the use of the code is still their preferred method of communicating. It has an ability to get through when conditions are poor and other communications methods are really not effective, and there's a real elegance to not only the code, but the incredibly simple equipment that you can use to communicate a single transistor. A few other components in a dry cell battery are all you need to make a low powered code transmitter, which is capable of communicating with people all over the world under certain conditions. You might be thinking that code is extremely slow way to communicate, and if five words a minute, it certainly is, but most operators, when they could good are operating somewhere between 20 and 30 words per minute, which is still pretty slow. It's a lot slower than you can talk, but using code effectively requires you to use some different techniques. One, a lot of abbreviations are used, some of which have found their way into text abbreviations, but it also requires you to give some thought to composing your sentence ahead of time so that it can be as concise as possible and also so that it doesn't go off in the wrong direction, which it often does in conversation as you get distracted by a new thought. So that was another benefit of the code to me. It taught me how to compose a sentence as concisely as possible and communicate it as clearly as possible. This was especially important when communicating with people that didn't speak English as their first language. This is my take on music recording. I'm Doug Fern. See you next time. I .