Some good thoughts. Morse Code is MORE than just sequences of 'dots' and 'dashes' (dits and dahs if you will!) What is also VERY important is 'timing'. if I send 'as' 'kin' 'g' instead of 'asking' or a word like 'yes' 'terd' 'ay' instead of 'yesterday' it has a great chance to become misunderstood or garbled. Morse has a definite "beat" like music, or you could say a cadence that must be kept up with if it is to be easily understood. I observe a lot of very disconnected words being sent nowadays that makes the code much more difficult to "decode" in the head. ESPECIALLY when one begins to copy whole syllables and/or words. The whole concept sounds very practical. Something you can do without l ooking at a keyboard too! 73, Sandy W5TVW ----- Original Message ----- From: "Margaret Leber" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Elecraft" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:50 AM Subject: [Elecraft] " Back to the Future - Morse Code and Cellular Phones"
| Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/) | http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7016 | | Back to the Future - Morse Code and Cellular Phones | by Brian McConnell | Jun. 28, 2005 | | I've spent most of the past five or so years thinking about handheld | devices, their limitations and how to work around them. Having worked | with telephones since I was in high school, this has been something of | an obsession. | | | The hot trend today is to cram every feature imaginable into mobile | telephone handsets. This has led to some cool things like camera phones, | mobile gaming, and such. The problem is that a lot of designers overlook | some basic limitations in these devices, and more importantly, the | situations in which people use them. | | | Cellular phones are all about mobility. Good mobility applications | recognize that the user is often in motion (walking, driving, etc). | Safety and convenience require that the application should demand as | little visual attention as possible. Badly designed applications force | the user to stare at the telephone's display instead of paying attention | to surrounding environs. This is why speech user interfaces work so well | for mobile users. They allow the user to interact with a service in a | "heads up" stance, without looking at the phone. Unfortunately, most | mobile applications are of the badly designed "let's take a PC interface | and shrink it down" category. | | | Text messaging is an enormously popular service, but it too suffers from | this basic user interface conflict. Sending and receiving text messages | requires the user to look at the display. Receiving messages can be done | at a glance, so this is not such a burden. Sending them is another | story. Some people are adept at tapping messages on numeric keypads, but | doing so requires the user to pay attention to the display. Try writing | a text message without looking at the phone. Not easy. | | | "Tapping" | | | Morse Code, or a derivative of it, could be one way to solve this | problem. With Morse Code, one could tap text messages out without | looking at the telephone, and without having to fumble with ever smaller | keypads. I'll admit that the idea of resurrecting Morse Code seems | improbable, but then it's worth remembering that only a few years ago, | the idea of people typing with their thumbs also seemed absurd. | | | How might Morse be incorporated into a telephone handset. I sketched out | a fairly simple interface. Here's what I came up with. | | | The telephone would have a fairly large pressure sensitive panel on its | back side, big enough that you would not have to look at the phone to | locate it. It might also be possible to use the telephone's existing | microphone to sense taps (although discriminating between short and long | pulses could be a problem). | | | You'd send messages in a couple of different ways depending on how you | were carrying the phone at the time. I devised a couple of tweaks to | make the process of sending messages faster. | | | When carrying the phone at your side, you could send messages with one | hand by tapping on the back of the phone in the convention dot (short) | and dash (notation). The panel would interpret a brief pulse as a dot, a | longer pulse as a dash. Timing is important, so this method of sending | messages takes more practice. | | | With both hands free or with the phone resting on a surface, you could | use a slightly different method to tap messages. Holding the phone in | one hand and tapping with the other, you'd tap the panel with your | fingernail to send a dot, and with your whole fingertip to send a dash. | Timing is much less important here, so this method will be easier for | people to learn. | | | Receiving messages is less of an issue, since they'll arrive as text | messages. The sending telephone will convert the tapped dots and dashes | into alphanumeric messages to be sent via SMS or IP. The receiving | telephone will display these in the usual way (an option to play | messages via text to speech synthesis would be a nice add-on, and as | mobile phones become more powerful, should be easy enough to do). | | | Hands-Free Mobile Phone Features | | | Incorporating a Morse Code key into the back of a telephone handset has | other uses besides tapping text messages. One of the things this enables | you to do is to make it easier to control a telephone in hands-free mode. | | | For example, you could design the phone so that it recognizes certain | codes as keypad commands, primarily for deciding how to deal with | incoming calls. | | | .. = answer call | ... = send call to voice mail | .... = forward call to preprogrammed number | | | So while you're driving along, you could dispatch incoming calls as | desired by tapping on the back of the handset, something you could do | heads up, without taking your eyes off the road. | | | While this isn't Morse Code per se, it's the same idea, and it should be | easy to train users to learn a handful of short two or three digit codes | as in the example above. This is probably more realistic than training | users to compose SMS messages in Morse, as anybody can memorize a | handful of tap sequences. | | | Back to the Future | | | I'll admit this may seem like a bit dated, but even with a Treo 600, I | find it difficult to type text messages. It seems to me that something | like this is worth a try. The cost of embedding this in a handset should | be pretty minimal compared to that of other features like digital | cameras. You're basically talking about a small plate attached to a | piezo-electric sensor, which is about as simple as it gets. Even better | if you can make this work using a phone's existing microphone to sense taps. | | | Would people actually use this? I don't know. It's hard to tell what | will catch on. I thought ringtones and camera phones were improbable at | best, and now those are both billion dollar industries. If something | like this makes it easier to use SMS, then my guess is that it will | catch on, at least with a subset of users. | | | While the Morse Code application may not catch on outside a small group | of power users, the idea of using Morse-like code to control a telephone | in hands-free mode makes a lot of sense. Tap twice to answer a call | while driving, three times to send it to voice mail, four times to | forward the call to your secretary. That'll be easier that opening the | phone and pushing a key while driving, and a heck of a lot safer. | | Brian McConnell is the founder of Trekmail, a mixed-media messaging | service provider. An inventor, serial entrepreneur, and author, he also | wrote Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien | Civilizations. | | oreillynet.com Copyright © 2004 O'Reilly Media, Inc. | | -- | -----/___. _)Margaret Stephanie Leber CCP, SCJP/"The art of progress / | ----/(, /| /| http://voicenet.com/~maggie SCWCD/ is to preserve order/ | ---/ / | / | _ _ _ ` _ AOPA 925383/ amid change and to / | --/ ) / |/ |_(_(_(_/_(_/__(__(/_ K3XS / preserve change amid/ | -/ (_/ ' .-/ .-/ ARRL 39280 /order."-A.N.Whitehead/ | /________________(_/_(_/_______AMSAT 32844_/<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>/ | | | _______________________________________________ | Elecraft mailing list | Post to: [email protected] | You must be a subscriber to post to the list. | Subscriber Info (Addr. 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