Why Morse Code Is Still Used Today
Recommendation ITU-R M.1677-1 runs to seven pages. It is the document that defines International Morse code for the world’s radiocommunication services, and its opening clause notes that versions of the code “have been in use since 1844.” A standards body still maintains it. That fact alone complicates the obituary.
The reasons the code survives are more specific than nostalgia, and several of them cut against the popular story.
Two codes wear the same name
What Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail sent over the Washington–Baltimore line in 1844 is not what anyone uses today.
The original American Morse used several different hold durations, and a few letters contained internal gaps of silence. European operators found it awkward on landlines. Friedrich Clemens Gerke rewrote close to half of it in 1848, cutting everything down to two symbols with one consistent silence interval. The German-Austrian Telegraph Union adopted his version in 1851. The International Telegraph Convention standardised it in Paris in 1865.
So the survivor is Gerke’s simplification, carrying Morse’s name. The more complicated version lost — which is this article’s whole argument, arriving about 175 years early.
What the standard actually specifies
Open M.1677-1 and one thing jumps out. Almost none of it describes shapes.
The rules govern time. A dash equals three dots. The gap inside a letter equals one dot, the gap between letters equals three, and the gap between words equals seven. To signal an error, an operator keys eight dots in a row.
Those ratios are the code. Dots and dashes on a printed chart are a transcription convention rather than the thing itself, and the distinction matters to anyone learning: a chart gives you the notation, not the rhythm the notation stands for.
The ITU still revises the document. Its most recent addition arrived in 2004, when the recommendation gained a character for the commercial at sign, ·−−·−·, so operators could send email addresses without spelling out “at.”
Two symbols, one switch
The most consequential modern use has nothing to do with radio.
Tania Finlayson, who was born with cerebral palsy, described her experience on Google’s blog in July 2018. As a child she joined a University of Washington study led by Al Ross, who had written a grant to fund a Morse communicator for non-verbal children. Two buttons, a dot and a dash, let her spell anything. “It gave me total freedom with my words,” she wrote.
Finlayson later worked with Google on the Morse keyboard in Gboard. She helped design the layout, added Morse sequences to the suggestion strip, and built settings that let people adapt it to their own movement. Google shipped it on Android and then on iOS in 2018. The Android version accepts external switches, so someone with very limited movement can drive a phone.
A 19th-century telegraph code fits that problem for the same reason Gerke’s revision won in the first place: it asks for two distinguishable events and nothing else.
The same property shapes how people learn it now. Because the code lives in timing, hearing it beats reading it. A browser translator such as MorseCodes.app plays typed text back at the ITU’s timing ratios. Charts give you notation; playback gives you rhythm.
Cockpits, ships, and the exams that ended
Aviation is where the code remains genuinely load-bearing, and most passengers never notice.
Every VOR navigation beacon transmits a three-letter identifier in Morse. The FAA’s Aeronautical Information Manual leaves no wiggle room about why: “The only positive method of identifying a VOR is by its Morse Code identification” or its recorded voice announcement. ILS localisers carry the same three letters, preceded by the letter I. During maintenance a facility may radiate T-E-S-T instead, warning pilots off. Crews check these idents on ordinary flights, daily.
The maritime story ran the other way. The IMO’s account of the GMDSS transition records that the system became fully operational on 1 February 1999, and that on that date “the Morse Code was phased out” for passenger ships and for cargo ships of 300 gross tonnage and upwards on international voyages.
American amateurs lost their mandate too. The FCC struck the five-words-per-minute telegraphy exam from the General and Amateur Extra licences, effective 23 February 2007. Nobody has to learn it now. Plenty of people still do.
The weak-signal claim doesn’t survive FT8
Here the popular version goes wrong, and the correction is more interesting than the myth.
Morse does reach absurd distances on very little power. It is no longer the most sensitive thing on the band, though. Steve Franke, Bill Somerville and Joe Taylor documented FT8’s performance in QEX in July 2020. On a non-fading channel, their decoder hits a 50% decode probability at −20.8 dB, reporting signal-to-noise in a 2500 Hz bandwidth. The WSJT-X user guide states the practical gap plainly: on VHF and above, contacts happen “at signal levels 10 to 15 dB below those required for CW.”
A laptop beats an ear, in other words, and it wins by a wide margin.
What Morse keeps is a different property. FT8 wants a computer, particular software, and a clock synchronised to within a second or so of everyone else’s. Morse wants a person who knows it. One of those dependencies survives a bad day. Sensitivity and robustness are not the same measurement, and the old code only ever won the second one.
Nothing new has entered the code since that 2004 addition. The ITU’s own text says the code “needs to be updated from time-to-time to meet the needs of the radiocommunication services,” which reads as an open invitation that nobody has taken up in two decades. Forty-odd characters, defined almost entirely by the length of a silence, and no one can think of anything worth adding.
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