SHORTWAVE — FIELD STATION LOG

A WWII-era field radio you operate in the browser. Tap Morse on a telegraph key, watch the decoder light up, and meet other operators drifting on the same frequency.

What this is

Shortwave is a simulator, not a radio. Nothing here transmits on the air and no licence is involved. What it does is reproduce the part of CW operating that a chart cannot teach you: the feel of a key under your hand, the delay before a stranger answers, and the particular concentration of copying something by ear while it is still arriving.

It grew out of a simple observation. Learning Morse from a table is easy and almost useless — you end up translating shapes instead of hearing characters. Learning it against another person, live, with something at stake, works. The relay exists so there is someone on the other end.

How it works

Every visit drops you onto a random frequency in one of the classic CW sub-bands. A frequency is a room: anyone tuned to the same number shares the ether with you. Drag the tuning knob, spin the wheel, or hit scan to wander until you find company.

Hold SPACE (or press and hold the key) to transmit. A short press is a dot, a longer press a dash; after a beat of silence the buffer commits to a letter. The decoder tree traces your path in amber; incoming operators glow green. Your key sounds at 620 Hz and theirs at 540 Hz, so you can tell yourself apart without looking.

Two on the key

A frequency carries two transmitting operators at a time — the first two to arrive. Anyone after that rides along in LISTEN ONLY, copying the traffic. When a transmitting operator leaves, the longest waiting listener is promoted automatically. It is a deliberate limit: two people can hold a conversation in Morse, and a dozen cannot.

Ear-copy mode

Flip the lever and the decoder goes dark. You still hear everything, but the letters are yours to write down. This is the drill wartime operators trained on and it is the only one that builds real copying speed — the decoder is a crutch, and the lever is there so you can take it away from yourself. The notepad keeps what you transcribe.

The rest of the station

Around the console there is a small reference library, all of it free and none of it gated. The primer covers timing, Farnsworth spacing and the habits that stall most beginners. The translator converts either direction and keys the result aloud; the trainer runs Koch-method practice and scores it; the chart prints on a single sheet. Prosigns, Q codes and the phonetic alphabet cover the shorthand you will actually hear. The dispatch board carries longer field notes, and the history explains how dots and dashes ended up bouncing off the ionosphere.

Who made it

Shortwave is a personal project — one person, built for the feel of it: bakelite, brass, amber phosphor and grain. There is no company behind it, no account to create, and no paid tier. Advertising covers the relay server and the domain, and that is the whole business model.

It is open source under the MIT licence, so the schematics are on GitHub — including the relay, if you want to check what it does with your traffic (the short answer is: passes it along and forgets it, as the privacy policy describes).

Corrections to any reference page are welcome and get made. Say hello: info@shortwaveradio.online, or see the contact page for what is worth writing about.