Ship Radio Room
The hardest decision in a radio room was rarely how to send something. It was what to handle first.
Click a message to move it into your order, click it again to take it back. The text is shown in plain letters on purpose - this exercise is about deciding, not about copying.
The ladder
Four levels, and the order between them is not negotiable:
- Distress
SOS- grave and imminent danger. Everything else on the frequency stops. - Urgency
XXX- serious, but nobody is about to die. A medical case, a steering failure. - Safety
TTT- a navigation warning or a weather message. Ice, gales, a light out of order. - Routine - everything else, including things that matter commercially.
The last line is where the learning is. A position report to the owners can be genuinely urgent for the company and still goes last. "Urgent" on the air does not mean "pressing for me"; it means life or ship.
Two things people get wrong
Loudness is not priority. A safety message about ice can arrive strong and clear while a distress call comes in weak and half buried. The prefix decides, not the signal.
More distress does not mean less distress. Two vessels in trouble at once does not turn either into routine traffic. Both come before everything else, and between them it is first come, first served - which is exactly how this tool scores it.
Why the prefixes look like that
None of them is an abbreviation. They were chosen for how they sound.
SOS ...---... is sent as one continuous signal with no letter
gaps - nothing else in Morse has that shape, and it survives a signal falling apart. XXX and TTT
are simple repeated characters, easy to recognise and hard to produce by accident.
The maritime radiotelegraph service that used them closed in 1999, when satellite distress alerting took over. The ladder itself did not go away; it moved to voice and to the equipment that replaced the key.
Hearing the difference
The "Hear the first one" button plays whichever message would be handled first, in Morse at 18 words per minute. Worth doing once per round: recognising a distress prefix by ear, in the middle of ordinary traffic, is a different skill from reading it off a screen - and it is the one an operator on watch actually needed.
The SOS page has the signal itself and the rules about when it may be sent.
Frequently asked questions
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What order do messages go in?
Distress, then urgency, then safety, then routine. Between messages of the same level it is first come, first served.
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Is a strong signal more important?
No. The prefix decides. A distress call arriving weak still outranks a loud and clear routine message.
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Is this how it works today?
The ladder still exists, but the maritime Morse service closed in 1999. Distress alerting now goes by satellite; the priority levels moved with it.