MORSE CODE TRANSLATOR

Type text and read it back as dots and dashes, or paste dots and dashes and read them back as text. Then key it aloud at any speed between 5 and 40 words per minute.

How the timing works

Morse is not a set of shapes, it is a set of durations. Everything is measured against a single time unit, and once that unit is fixed the whole code follows from it: a dot is one unit, a dash is three, the silence between the dots and dashes inside one character is one unit, the silence between characters is three, and the silence between words is seven. Nothing else is negotiable. An operator sending badly is almost always sending the symbols correctly and the gaps wrongly.

Speed is quoted in words per minute, where the reference word is PARIS — chosen because, counting every dot, dash and internal gap plus the word space that follows it, it comes to exactly 50 units. Fifty units per word at one word per minute gives 60,000 ms / 50 = 1200 ms per unit, so the unit length at any speed is simply 1200 / WPM milliseconds. At 14 WPM that is about 86 ms for a dot and 257 ms for a dash; at 25 WPM it is 48 ms and 144 ms. The player above uses that formula directly, and the tone sits at 620 Hz, the same pitch as the station's sidetone. A tone that low is easy to listen to for an hour, which matters more than it sounds.

Why Morse has no capital letters

There is no upper and lower case in Morse, and there never was. The code was built for a telegraph sounder and a trained ear, not for a typesetter, so a and A are the same character: di-dah. Translators like this one print the result in capitals purely by convention — it is how received traffic has been written on a message pad since the 1840s, and it keeps a hand-copied log unambiguous.

The practical consequence is that a round trip through Morse is lossy. Send "Field Day" and it comes back "FIELD DAY". The same applies to any formatting: there is no bold, no tab, no line break. Operators recovered the missing structure with prosigns instead — BT(-...-) for a paragraph break, AA for a new line — and with a strict message format for anything that had to survive relaying by hand.

Characters with no Morse equivalent

The international code defines the 26 Latin letters, the ten digits and roughly eighteen punctuation marks. That is the whole set. There is no code for #, %, *, <, >, [, ], {, }, ~, ^, | or the backtick, and no code for emoji or any non-Latin script. Several national variants added accented letters — É is ..-.., Ü is ..--, Ñ is --.-- — but a receiving operator outside that tradition will copy them as nonsense, which is why they are rare on the air.

Rather than drop those characters silently, this translator prints a # where the code should be and lists every offending character under the box, so you can see exactly what will not survive transmission. Going the other way, a group of dots and dashes that matches nothing in the table is printed as [?] and listed the same way — which is usually how you discover a mistyped dash or a missing space between two characters. Real operators solve the gap by spelling things out: a multiplication sign becomes X, a percentage becomes "PCT", a slash already has a code (-..-.) and does most of the work.

Using the audio to train

Read the output box and you will learn to read Morse, which is a skill almost nobody needs. Listen to it and you learn to hear Morse, which is the skill the mode is built on. Use the player deliberately: put the speed at 18 to 20 WPM, well above what you can copy, then look away from the screen and write down what you hear with a pencil. Each character should arrive as one sound with its own rhythm — dah-di-dah-dit is C, not "dash dot dash dot" to be assembled afterwards. If you find yourself counting, the speed is too slow, not too fast.

Short sessions beat long ones. Fifteen minutes a day will move you faster than two hours on a Sunday, because the bottleneck is reflex, not knowledge. Paste in a paragraph of ordinary prose rather than random letters once you have the alphabet, since real text carries the letter frequencies and the common words — THE, AND, DE, CQ, 73 — that you will eventually recognise whole. When a character keeps escaping you, look it up on the chart, send it twenty times, and go back to copying. For a structured path from two characters to the full alphabet, the Koch trainer does the drilling for you and keeps score.