My first Morse code transmission

Morse Code may seem like an outdated mode of communication from an ancient era. After all, Morse code dates back to the 1830s and was used in the Civil War and both world wars. By the mid-1800s, Morse code was the internet of that time period – messages traveled across the US and Europe carrying news, stock market prices, and diplomacy via physical wires called the telegraph. Sometime in the 1890s, Morse code went wireless and was transmitted via radio waves for the first time. What made this analog mode of communication so valuable was its simplicity and effectiveness. Transmitting Morse code via radio waves only required basic equipment and modest power. Those qualities still hold true today, and it's the reason that Morse code is still actively used by hobbyists.

In 2017 I became a licensed amateur radio operator. All this means is that I studied for and passed a test that allows me to legally experiment with electronics, modify radio equipment, and transmit on certain frequencies allocated to radio operators. This could include Morse code, voice, and digital data. I found out about amateur radio from a stranger I met while filling in for my boss at a work meeting. I went home and Googled "amateur radio," and with no prior experience in radios started studying for the entry-level exam using an iPhone app as my primary learning tool. Anyone with a bit of interest and curiosity can study and take the test like I did.

Studying for the exam is just the entry point into a hobby with what feels like a thousand possible niches and sub-hobbies, all connected to the magical laws of the universe. Usually after learning how something works, I think, "Ok that's how it works, that makes sense now." Some examples are how a mechanical watch keeps time, how an internal combustion engine works, biomechanics, and musical acoustics. But there are some things, even after I learn how they work, I still have trouble believing that they actually do work. These things blow my mind. Encoding music on a piece of plastic (a vinyl record), signals over a wire (telegraph, ethernet, fiber optic cables etc.), electromagnetism, and the RF spectrum, to name a few.

One of the rabbit holes I wanted to go down was Morse code. When I was studying for the test in 2017, my goal was to have a portable, low-power setup that I could take anywhere and operate - that's now the setup that I run today. My radio can transmit using a maximum of 10 watts of power from a battery, and it's small and light enough to fit in a backpack with all the gear I'd need to operate. So what makes Morse code effective for my use case? Morse code is not universally the best when it comes to radio, but it let's you hold a conversation with minimal power and minimal gear. A 10 watt Morse signal can make contacts where a voice signal often cannot.

Last Friday night, I sat in my bedroom with a magnetic loop antenna on the floor leaning on my dresser and my Morse code key in my lap, both connected to my radio. I'd spent enough time listening to other conversations and I wanted to try transmitting to see if anyone would respond. I turned my radio up to its full 10 watts of power to baseline of what my setup could do. Then I called CQ with my callsign for the first time on-air. I'd done this sequence a thousand times or more over the last couple weeks at varying speeds. Now this is the real deal. My first call was near-perfect Morse at about 20 words per minute. I'm more comfortable between 20-25 wpm than anything slower or faster.

Since it was well past midnight, most people in my part of the US were in bed or doing other Friday night activities that didn't involve Morse code or radios. So I only half expected someone would actually pick up my call. This eased the nerves and gave me a confidence boost during my first time transmitting. Probably no one was actually listening, and if they were who's going to answer a CQ in the wee hours of the night.

After calling CQ periodically for 8 minutes or so with no response I started to wonder if my setup was actually working. How could I confirm? Oh! I remembered the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN). RBN is a network of receiving stations around the world the listen for CQ calls and reoirt who they heard and how strong the signal was. Let's see if any receivers picked up my calls. I was pleasantly surprised to find the following image on the RBN website:

Sitting in bed with a modest, less than ideal setup, my 10 watts made it all the way to Germany over 4,000 miles away! Holy moly! This means that one of the beacons received a clear enough signal to decode my CQ and callsign from my dresser-propped mag loop antenna on 10 watts. Mind is blown. Maybe this was luck? Not sure yet. But I know now that my 10 watts made it a lot further than I initially thought it would - it made it across the entire Atlantic Ocean in a fraction of a second. My setup definitely works.

No one answered my CQ, and that's ok. I didn't make my first contact, but I proved something to myself. A battery, a small radio, a loop antenna, and a few dots and dashes are enough to reach across an ocean. This is one of those things I understand on paper and still have trouble believing. My signal left my bedroom, bounced off the Earth's atmosphere (the ionosphere), and landed in a receiver in Germany before I could lift my finger off the key. No cell towers, no internet, no infrastructure in between. Just physics doing its thing.