Various sources have picked up on the FCC’s announcement that it is removing the requirement of five-words-per-minute Morse code that was required to get an amateur radio license. Boing Boing and Engadget (uggh!) for example talk about the ‘dead’ language, arcane, old and tired. Digital communications, the SMS and the web are here to stay, and replace Morse, right? Maybe not so fast.
When disasters such as Katrina strike, modern digital communication networks fail – and this is a fact. Generators can only give juice to power-hungry cell networks for so many hours, and that is if the generators are working (and have not been stolen!). Usually, in these scenarios, initial status reports, help requests, and coordination attempts come from none other than the amateur radio community, and in many cases, it comes in…morse. When your expensive Motorola phone stops working, a radio ham will build a QRP (low power) transmitter with nothing else but a few capacitors, resistors, and coils, power it off whatever battery he can find (or even a solar cell), and start sending out dashes and dots. The reason for Morse code? It stands out above the noise, and thus makes faint signals much easier to interpret.
Remember the famous SOS, Save Our Souls, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, …—…, which was sent out by the Titanic before its final trip to the bottom of the ocean. If you have a radio ham friend, give him a hug, and ask him to please keep proficient in morse, if only for when the bad times come.
Personally, I think it is right to remove it as a requirement for obtaining a license, knowing Morse will be something to be proud of. A couple of stories related to Morse – in the movie “Enemy of the state”, starred by Will Smith and Gene Hackman, the ultra-high-tech surveillance satellite used by the NSA to track a prey is actually seen sending out the letters ‘CQ’ in Morse…these stand for ‘attention airwaves, I have something to say’. Nice touch from a good friend, Steve Uhrig, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago (more on this in a post coming soon) and who was the technical advisor in the movie.
The second story is in the movie “Space Camp”, where I can only remember Lea Thompson, and is about a space shuttle that is launched into orbit with a bunch of kids from Space Camp on board. For some strange reason, the long-range radios hadn’t been installed (uh?), and so one of the kids actually starts sending out Morse to mission control, by flicking a switch on the shuttle that toggles a lamp on some telemetry panel down in Houston.