Morse sounds like a useful thing, really. There aren't many digital encodings that can be done by hand and still remain readable in high-noise conditions.
Oh it's useful and if you want to use it that doesn't change. However a number of us are interested in the digital and experimental side of ham radio, for that morse code doesn't really offer anything and it's a non-trivial hurdle to cross.
The hobby already struggles with gatekeeping/driving off people who don't "ham right" and so making the hobby more accessible is a big positive in my book.
Exactly this. Current ham regs in the digital modes really, really limits what you can do, and keeps it in the dark ages compared to what goes on in 900mhz and 2.4ghz with unlicensed devices. We need to get back to where having a ham license means you can do cutting edge things!
Give it a rest. No one holds you back in amateur radio and if the comments of old farts bothers you, perhaps you need to evaluate what prompts them to tell you that.
As long as you are Part 97 compliant, what exactly is your problem?
it has a number of pretty big downsides. for example, it's not a hamming code and isn't self synchronizing. it's not horrible, but it is missing a lot of the properties you would want from a modern digital code.
That's a really bad way of looking at it. From a theoretical perspective yes but it's more useful if you think of it is a language. If you do it for a bit you'll get it and you tend to pick it up like another conversation method with different sounds that's all. It's not dots and dashes, it's musical phrases that you learn. And from that, like conversation, you fill in gaps and recognise words automatically.
I mean the most basic CQ is dah dit dah dit - dah dah dit dah. You don't heard the dots or the dashes, you hear the rhythm. You don't see the CQ either, you know the concept from the rhythm as part of the conversation.
What is a "stupid lightbulb" in this case? is that some kind of "ham operator" parlance, or are you only referring to using Morse code and a flashlight/light source?
You still need equipment to transmit/receive radio...
I would understand perhaps semaphore because anyone can wave their arms about and communicate long distances.
But since radio requires equipment anyway, you might as well use modern digital equipment - with the benefit that in the same amount of time, power and bandwidth that a morse signal would use, you can send 10,000x more data.
Morse is the ultimate narrowband mode. The cleaner your oscillator and the narrower your output the better. On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator.
The only comparable digital mode is on-off keying which is used by cheap, low data rate devices. Even 'narrow' digital modes are wideband compared to morse code.
The bandwidth of a CW signal depends very much on the bandwidth of the modulation, eg the faster the keying speed, the wider the bandwidth.
"On the receive side, you can make your receiver as narrow at the transmitters oscillator". Completely wrong, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding.
Morse is a wonderful mode, but suffers from the lack of error correction which had made modes like PSK31 and FT8 so much more effective, especially in bandwidth usage.
> The sidebands of morse code carry no information and are incidental.
The sidebands in CW ARE the information. If there were no sidebands, there would be no information.
> When the key is down there is no modulation whatsoever.
No, but you can't keep the key down forever. The information is in the transition from Key-down to Key-up (and Vice/versa). Which is why the modulation envelope (eg bandwidth) has to be tailored to the keying speed.
> You can easily use a transmitter with Gaussian keying to reduce the sidebands to zero.
Gausian keying requires a Raised-Cosine envelope. It is this which contains the sidebands and the information, and causes the B/W to be widened.
