Doug McLaren wrote:

In article ,
Michael Coslo wrote:

| At a lower level, anything is digital when you look at it that way. A
| photograph, digital audio, whatever.

Digital audio is digital if you look at it that way? Cute.

Well, my XYL thinks I'm cute. 8^)

As for a photograph, a black and white photograph could be seen that
way -- after all, at the molecular level, a molecule of pigment is
either there or not there. It's quantized.

True enough.

But no, not everything is digital. A specific sound isn't digital --
sure, you could approximate it with a digital stream, but ultimately
it's just an approximation, no matter how fast your digital stream is.

| If Morse code was really digital, there would be no need to have a
| lower level

Are you even thinking about what you're saying here?

If there's only one level, then a morse code signal would be just a
constant tone. It's hard to put much information into a constant,
unchanging tone. If you want to transmit some information, you're
going to need to have at least two states to choose from.

| Morse code is either on or off. 1 or 0. You're either emitting a
| signal, or you're not -- there's no in between.
|
| Ahh, so the space between the dits and dahs means nothing? There is
| definitely an "in between" It is how we determine what the words a

The space between the dits and dahs is `off' -- either 1, 3 or 7
zeros. The dits and dahs are `on', either one or three 1s.

Look at my other post where I converted your CQ call to a binary
representation of it.

You converted. That is the core of the issue. I have no argument
with what you did or what others have done to take a input of Morse code
and convert it into a digital form.


| ..... is that the number 5, or is it HE or is it SI, or IS or EH?

If you feel that I claimed that the spaces are unimportant, then you
did not understand me very well. Spaces are represented by a number
of zeros, and dits and dahs by a number of ones. Binary.

I completely understand that the spaces are of equal importance to all
the other states.

| Longer periods of 1's = dahs
| Shorter periods of 1's = dits
| Short period of 0's = space between a dit or a dah.
| Longer period of 0's = space between characters.
| Even longer period of 0's = space between words.
|
| You have just described more than two states.

Sure -- I was trying to explain how it all boils down to two states.

Understood. But you have to write software to take that Morse code
signal and convert it or boil it down or whatever.

RTTY usually carries information encoded with BAUDOT. (You do believe
that RTTY is digital, right? Even with that 1.5 baud stop bit?) Each
BAUDOT character is chosen by 5 bits -- that's 32 states, and then
there's the state of the shift, which gives you about 62 states (64 -
2, since two states don't matter.)

So RTTY/BAUDOT uses somewhere between 32 and 64 states. But you do
believe that that RTTY and BAUDOT are binary modulations or codes,
right?

| It's not a particularly efficient binary code, but it *is*, at the
| lowest level, binary -- there's only two states. It's certainly not
| analog, or tinary, or ...
|
| Disagree. It isn't analog for sure, but with only a 1 and a zero, it
| cant be described.

... but I just did in my other post. It was a bit tedious, but hardly
impossible.

I wasn't precise there. You have to time the signal, and assign
multiple 1's and 0's to different parts of the sent signal.

| Trying to describe it with 1's and 0's means that you
| have to translate it. That longer dah, is not a 1.

That is correct -- dah is not 1. It's three 1s in a row, followed by
at least one 0.

So you convert a dah into 3 1's and a zero. This sounds more to me like
a conversion than anything else.


| It cannot be the same thing as the short dit. If both of them are
| 1's, the analogy fails

Sure. The short dit is just a single 1, followed by at least one 0.

A 1 and a 0. Like I said it's a conversion.

That it is not a difficult conversion is not the point.

| I'm saying that in order to have Morse code be binary, you have to
| digitize it, so to speak. You have to have a clocking action, and a dah
| has to either be something other than a "1" if the dit is considered a
| "1". If it was truly digital, you wouldn't have to do any of that.

Have you looked at your morse code key lately? It has two positions
-- on and off. That alone should be enough to let you realize that
it's binary.

Just a second ago. I have an Iambic key, so that kind of clouds the
issue. I have a key for dits, a key for dats, and nothing happens if I
don't touch either.

Things like PSK31 and RTTY/BAUDOT aren't any different, except that
the computer does the translation down to the binary level rather than
your brain and your finger.

It could be argued that the human brain doesn't easily deal with
binary codes. Which would make sense -- many of us had a hard time
learning morse code, even at the slowest possible speed. Yet it's
only about 40 characters, which shouldn't be hard to memorize at all.

I had a hard time due to deafness. My XYL would agree with you if you
said I don't listen very well! ;^)


- Mike KB3EIA -