LICW

Oddly enough, Morse Code has been in the news lately. Here are three articles that I’ve run across recently……Dan

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This article appear in the  January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian.

Looking to Ditch Twitter?
Morse Code is Back

For almost 20 years, Steve Galchutt, a retired graphic designer, has trekked up Colorado mountains accompanied by his pack of goats to contact strangers around the world using a language that is almost two centuries old, and that many people have given up for dead. On his climbs, Galchutt and his herd have scared away a bear grazing on raspberries, escaped from fast-moving forest fires, camped in subfreezing temperatures and teetered across a rickety cable bridge over a swift-moving river where one of his goats, Peanut, fell into the drink and then swam ashore and shook himself dry like a dog. “I know it sounds crazy, risking my life and my goats’ lives, but it gets in your blood,” he tells me by phone from his home in the town of Monument, Colorado. Sending Morse code from a mountaintop—altitude offers ham radios greater range—“is like being a clandestine spy and having your own secret language.”

…read more

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Forget dot com, Americans are making a new dash for Morse code

A few years ago a group of New York ham radio enthusiasts decided to address a glaring problem. “There were not enough Morse code operators on Long Island,” said Howard Bernstein, 70, a retired chemicals importer.

Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to The Times to read the entire article. I don’t usually include articles behind pay walls, but I thought this was illustrative of a trend, so I included it here…Dan

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I thought that perhaps the military’s experience with the Basic Morse Mission Trainer (BMMT) might have some applicability in teaching amateur radio operators Morse Code. I asked about this on the CWops mailing list, thinking that some of the members might have been trained using this system. While there were a couple, they didn’t think that this would be a good way to teach hams Morse Code. For one thing, the training was very specific to receiving random code groups and not with actually communicating with Morse Code…Dan

Innovation on Morse Code for the US Military

On January 10, 1991, the U.S. Army Intelligence School Devens (USAISD) introduced the Basic Morse Mission Trainer to the 98H Morse intercept operator and 98D emitter identifier/locator advanced individual training courses. This system revolutionized the training of Morse code copying skills for both students and instructors, reducing course attrition, and turning out better trained operators faster.

In April 1985, the deputy secretary of defense had approved the consolidation of all four military services’ manual Morse intercept training at USAISD, located at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. By 1988, consolidated training was in full swing, but instructors struggled with high attrition rates and student burnout in the basic Morse course. Mitigation measures included shortening the training day, standing up a diagnostic laboratory to help identify learning patterns of Morse students, and developing an aptitude test to predict student success in the course.

Perhaps the most significant factor to reducing course failures, however, was the introduction of the Basic Morse Mission Trainer (BMMT) to teach touch-typing and basic Morse code. Developed by Russell Beller and Kevin Mott, two civilian instructors in USAISD’s Morse Collection Department (MCD), the new computer-based system would replace the antiquated Morse Code Trainer (MCT)-4 in use since the late 1960s. The Army awarded a procurement contract to Engineering Research Associates on April 19, 1989 which delivered the new systems in October 1990. Three months later, on January 10, 1991, the BMMT was used for the first time in training.

…read more