Build a Morse signal
The reverse of everything else here: not a tone becoming characters, but a character becoming a shape in time.
Listening teaches patterns. Building teaches the timing grid - and that is exactly where the errors sit that show up later: in your own sending, in a tattoo, in a home-made flashing circuit.
The blocks below have different widths, in proportion to their duration. A dash is three times as wide as a dot, a word gap seven times. Were they all the same width, this would be a text field with buttons and the exercise pointless.
The five numbers it all comes down to
The whole of Morse code sits in five lengths, measured in a unit that depends on speed:
- Dot: 1 unit of tone
- Dash: 3 units of tone
- Gap inside a character: 1 unit of silence
- Gap between characters: 3 units of silence
- Gap between words: 7 units of silence
Everything follows from that. An H is four dots with three gaps between them, making seven units. The word PARIS with the word gap after it is exactly fifty - which is why speed is measured against it: 20 words per minute means PARIS twenty times in a minute. The arithmetic is under timing and speed.
Readable is not the same as right
The check distinguishes two levels, and the difference is the most instructive part of the tool.
Readable means the sequence yields the correct text. Exact means the timing grid is right too. The two come apart as soon as a gap is missing - build a dot and a dash without the gap between them and it still reads .-, but what you hear is one long tone. Checking only for readability would let you win by leaving out every gap.
That is why hear yours sits right next to hear the model. The difference you overlook on screen is immediately there in the sound.
The commonest mistake
Gaps between characters that are too short. Three units feels like an eternity while building, and almost everyone sets it too tight. The result: two characters merge into a third. E and T without enough space make A; I and E make S.
That is also the commonest fault in Morse code tattoos - there the artist spaces the dots evenly by eye, and one word turns into another. If you are planning one, tattoo check is the counter-test.
Frequently asked questions
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Why is the word gap seven and not eight?
Because the three units of the character gap are included: after the last character of a word there are seven units of silence in total, not three plus seven. Historically the number comes from telegraph practice and was fixed internationally with the code in 1865.
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Do I really have to place the gaps one by one?
Here yes, and that is the point. In the translator they appear automatically - but anyone who has never placed them does not know what the generator is doing.
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What is the free text for?
It lets you build your own word, a name for a bracelet for instance. The check then tells you reliably whether the spacing is right before it becomes beads or ink.