lee/hpr-knowledge-base
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Update metadata and transcripts through end of July 2026

Browse Source 
Refreshed episodes/hosts/comments/series from hpr.sql, and added
official HPR transcripts for the 180 episodes aired since the last
sync (hpr4516-hpr4695).
This commit is contained in:
Lee Hanken
2026-07-31 16:18:57 +01:00
parent 37e8274bff
commit 087f80c44d
184 changed files with 61169 additions and 41 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files
hpr_transcripts/hpr4547.txt
+104
View File
@@ -0,0 +1,104 @@
Episode: 4547
Title: Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 6: The speed and timing of Morse
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4547/hpr4547.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:43 (official HPR transcript)
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4547, for 2026-01-06
Today's show is entitled, "Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 6: The speed and timing of Morse "
The host is Trey and the duration is 00:10:51
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "A discussion of the Morse code speed and timing considerations needed for our CYD project"
Hello again, this is Tray. Welcome to Part 6 and my cheap yellow display project series.
Thank you so much for hanging in there with me on this rambling series.
If you wish to catch up on any of the earlier episodes, you can find them on my HPR profile page,
and there's a link to that in the show notes.
To review,
my project is to build a portable Morris code key or memory,
which can be connected to any amateur radio HF Transsever by simply plugging it into the code key input port.
This is based on an ESP32 platform which comes pre-packaged on a yellow PCB board with color touch screen display and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
We commonly call this contraption the cheap yellow display.
So far, I've defined the necessities collected the required hardware and failed miserably at building the graphical user interface.
While I sort out the technical challenges getting my GUI code to play nicely with this cheap yellow display's touch screen,
it's important that we spend some time discussing Morris code itself,
and the timing standards that we will need to follow.
I am not going to dive too deeply into the history behind telegraphs and Morris code, but it is very interesting.
If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has the origins and evolution written out very nicely on a page that I've posted a link to in the show notes.
For our purposes, we will fast forward from the year 1821 telegraphy began all the way to 1865.
When the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU, standardized what it called, International Morris Code.
When I say Morris Code for the remainder of this podcast, I'm referring to this ITU International Morris Code.
Morris Code typically includes the following characters.
The 26-letter basic Latin alphabet.
The India-Arabic numerals 0-9.
And then there's also a single-accented Latin E.
And it's written as an E with an accent mark over the top of it, in a handful of punctuation marks.
These characters are encoded using a sequence of short and long signals.
Each short signal is referred to as a DIT.
Each long signal is referred to as a DIT.
At a young age, I began to refer to them as dots and dashes, as this was how they were usually written.
For example, the letter A consists of a single DIT, followed by a single DIT.
When written, it would look like a period, followed by a hyphen, or what some people might call a minus sign.
And you can see this written now, or typed out in the show notes.
This encoding method allows messages to be sent by turning on and off an electric signal.
This could result in a light flashing, or a tone sounding to the pattern of the signal.
The timing of a DIT and a DA, along with the spacing in between them, is clearly defined.
Morrisco.world does a great job explaining the timing, and you can find their explanation at the length that I've posted in the show notes.
It all starts with the DIT, or more accurately, the amount of time the DIT signal is turned on.
We will call this length of time one unit.
Everything else is based upon this one unit.
We will get to the actual length of time for that unit later in the episode.
For now, it's just one unit.
So if a DIT is one unit long, a DA will be three units long.
So there is an obvious consistent difference between a DIT and a DA.
Also, empty space between elements of the same character is one unit long, and the space between characters should be three units long.
Let's demonstrate this using the letters H, P, and R.
And H would be four DITs.
A P would be one DIT followed by two DAs, and ending with one DIT.
And R would be one DIT followed by one DA, and ending with one DIT.
Remember, when we send these grouped together like a word, we need three units of spacing between each character.
You can hear this now. This is the Morse code for the letters HPR transmitted at 15 words per minute.
And that is a perfect segue to the next section, words per minute.
The speed of Morse code is measured in words per minute.
But how do you calculate this when some characters are short, like the letter E, which is only a single DIT long, and other characters are long, like the letter J, which starts with a single DIT, and is followed by three DAs.
And that's just letters. What about words? We have short words and long words. How can we standardize on words per minute with so many diversity of length?
Well, thanks to the French. We have a quite elegant solution to this problem. Well, okay, not the French in general, just Paris.
Paris is the standard word, which has been agreed upon, to be used for determining the speed of Morse code.
The word Paris is 50 units long. How do we come up with that?
The letter P consists of a DIT, then remember another DIT, another unit in between the DIT and the next thing. So one for the DIT, one for the blank space, three for a DA, one in between again, and three for another DA, one in between again, and one DIT. That's 11 units.
And it also is very confusing when I spell it out. It's written in the show notes.
Then there would be three units of space in between the P and the A. All right. Now in A, we said before, it's a DIT and a DA, so that would be one unit for the DIT, one unit in between three units for the DA, five units.
Now another three units in between the letter A and the letter R. A letter R is DIT, DA, DIT. So that would be one unit for the DIT, one unit in between three units for the DA, one unit in between one unit for the DIT, seven units total.
Again, spacing in between letters is three units. Now the letter I, which is just two DITs. Oh, yeah, and there's a space in between.
So one for the DIT, one for the space in between one for the DIT, three in it. Another three units for the space in between the letter I and the letter S, an S, is three DITs.
So one unit for the DIT, one unit for the space in between another unit for the DIT, another unit for the DIT, another unit for the DIT, that's five units. And then we tack on seven units for the space in between words at the end of it.
So, if you take the 11 plus to 3 plus to 5 plus to 3 plus to 7 plus to 3 plus to 3 plus to 3 plus to 5 plus to 7, you end up with 50 units for the word Paris.
That was a lot. Again, if you want to visualize it, you can see it in the show notes.
Or if you want to hear it, here is the word Paris, sent at 15 words per minute.
More as code world does a great job explaining the maths for how many milliseconds long a ditch should be for a specific words per minute of code.
But no, we can't keep that simple.
Some guy named Donald R. Russ Farnsworth had the complicate things and increased the gaps between the letters to make the interpretation of the code easier.
So there's even more maths for Farnsworth timing. Wait, wait, wait a minute.
When did I start saying maths instead of math like a normal North American?
What is the reasoning behind pluralizing the word math anyways?
Which way is more original to the English language math or maths?
This sounds like a show idea for someone other than myself.
So if you know the reasons behind this or you're interested in researching it and sharing it with us, I look forward to listening to your show in the future.
Alright, back on track. Anyways, there is is much more math about Farnsworth timing on another page on Morris Code World and there's links to all of these in the show notes.
But I don't want to get into all of that detail there. Not when there is a shortcut we can use within our code.
Simplified we can take 1,200 and divide it by the number of words per minute we desire and it will give us a close enough approximation to the number of milliseconds long a dip or a unit should be for what we are doing.
So for example 15 words per minute the messages you've been listening to throughout this episode.
Addit was 1200 divided by 15 which equals 80 milliseconds in length. It was 80 milliseconds in length.
If I speed it up to 20 words per minute which is the speed that I try to practice at.
Addit would be 1200 divided by 20 which is equal to 60 milliseconds long. That's pretty short.
This will be an important calculation for us as we develop the code we will learn or we will use later on as we construct the our messages and how the.
And this is a good stopping point so that I can get back to trying to build that infernal GUI.
Goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcast, click on our upload link
to find out how easy it is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an AnHonestHost.com, the Internet Archive,
rsync.net, and our mirror network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.