Morse Code

[Gianni]

3 hours ago, roseramms said:

... My question is, if I am ever in a situation where I'd need to 'receive' Morse code, how likely is it that I won't have the advantage of the message repeating?

usaully, in real world, when you receive morse from a remote operator, he can also hear if you are transmitting something, so if you need to stop him, while he is transmitting, you can interrupt him by starting to transmit a sequence of dots ; when he hears the dot sequence he stops his transmission and waits to hear your request. Normally then you will broadcast something like this
"PLS RPT AA word" (in morse code of course) which means Please Reapeat All After word, where word will be the last word you have received. (in morse there are a lot of abbreviations used to shorten words. there is also the so called Q code, where each group of 3 letters starting with the letter Q has a particular meaning ... and that meaning is the same in all the world)

 

3 hours ago, roseramms said:

 I can translate by ear without having to write down the Morse first and translate it on paper, but I often have to listen several times because I get behind for a moment and have to start over. I might need to sharpen that skill some more so I can translate faster, but if it's not really going to be an issue, then it isn't a problem.

Absolutely do not write Morse signals on paper !! and even worse, not translating Morse signals written on paper. To learn Morse you must ONLY hear the Morse signals by listening to those signals with your hearing. Even if at first it seems too difficult, with "a lot" of training it will become automatic. Also, you don't have to read what you receive, you have to write on paper letter by letter while receiving morse signals without reading the meaning of what you are writing, in this way you have less chance of making mistakes

 

3 hours ago, roseramms said:

 Also, is it customary to translate English to Morse on paper and then transmit it? Or do it on the fly, so to speak?

You have to transmit with the Morse key while reading the letters in clear text (absolutely do not translate the letters into morse symbols on the sheet!) you have to do it mentally. With practice you will associate each letter with a "sound", the sound you hear when you receive that letter in Morse code. No Morse operator counts the dots and lines, but learns to recognize the particular sound emitted by the sequence of dots and lines of each letter. In fact, if you ask a Morse operator for example what the letter F in morse looks like, he will never tell you 2 points a line and a point, but will emit the sound of that letter by saying "ti ti taa ti" that is the "sound" for the F letter. You will never learn morse by counting the number of dots and letters, but you will learn it by listening to the "sound" emitted by the sequence of dots and lines of each letter numbers and punctuation marks.

[RTFC]

Gianni (Hi Chimp! ) is absolutely right. When I lived in the US, a friend introduced me to amateur radio, which was so much fun that I studied and acquired 4 out of  (then) 5 FCC licenses (now there's only 3), which (until fifteen years ago) required morse code proficiency tested at official exams. The way I taught myself was (of course) to write a simple computer programme that picked random sentences from large text files (nowadays I'd probably use a live internet newsfeed, or something similar) and beeped the morse code audio at me for transcription at a desired speed (lowest requirement was 5 words per minute, with a word on average 5 letters long), and then slowly(!) cranking up the speed. Do this for no more than half an hour each day (in the beginning you'll get tired quickly) for a month or two and you'll get to a point where you're fast enough to start transcribing real messages in the ether (provided you've got a decent radio set to find them).  There's also websites like this and this one.

And don't forget that morse can also be transmitted as flashes of light (you could easily change the code to produce those instead). Best of luck.

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Edited February 22, 2022 by RTFC