"American Morse Code" Poster on eBay

K4EET

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pjxii

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That is 100% accurate. American Morse Code is different than the more common International Morse Code.
Really? I've never heard that. When would it be used?
It seems odd to have spaces between dits in characters, and the Zero being one very long dah. How could you tell the difference between two E's and an O?
 

RMason

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It seems odd to have spaces between dits in characters, and the Zero being one very long dah. How could you tell the difference between two E's and an O?
American Morse has multiple lengths of dashes and spaces. The gap between letters is longer than the gap within a character. It appears that American Morse Code was highly dependent upon the timing and rhythm of the dots, dashes, and the gaps.

In its original implementation, the Morse Code specification included the following:

  1. short mark or dot ( ▄ )
  2. longer mark or dash ( ▄▄ )
  3. intra-character gap (standard gap between the dots and dashes in a character)
  4. short gap (between letters)
  5. medium gap (between words)
  6. long gap (between sentences)
  7. long intra-character gap (longer internal gap used in C, O, R, Y, Z and &)
  8. "long dash" ( ▄▄▄▄ , the letter L)
  9. even longer dash ( ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ , the numeral 0)
The "long intra-character gap" included within a few letters was sometimes mistaken for a separator between two letters
 

bw415

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American Morse was still in use in the 1960s at the train depot where I grew up in Iowa. My father had a welding shop back then and I remember going with him to pick up supplies at the train depot. Later, when I got interested in ham radio, I found out the guy who ran the depot was a ham. He explained how he had to know both American Morse and International Morse.
 

tuihill

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There are many variations of the phonetic alphabet; Swiss, German, British, etc.

NATO is the standard for that organization.
As far as I know, and I'm a pilot, aviation worldwide has been using the so called NATO alphabet since I was licensed in 1973. Prior to that I was a member of the RCMP and in 1967 we were not allowed to use any other. Don't know how long that had been the case but they were making a federal case of it then.
 
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