MorseMail Home | Joystick connection | Mouse connection
I've been practicing the Morse code art for close to 40 years now. It has given me so much pleasure I'm hoping to find a way to foster its use in this new "digital age" so the art can be preserved through future generations. This is the "mission" of brasspounder.com.
MorseMail is a simple text format that encodes mark and space times to make it possible to send Morse coded messages via email. Here is a short sample file of some MorseMail text (the numbers represent milliseconds -- positive for mark, negative for space).
I have written a free little Windows program, called MorseMail, which can be used to record and play keying and send and receive it via text for email or a "transceiver" for QSOs.
Latest MorseMail
version
is
2001.05.27
- adds playback Pause/Skip feature.
You can download the MorseMail ZIP file here (131KB)
or download the MorseMail EXE file here (264KB)
You can view the change log for the MorseMail program to see what is new.
Click here to subscribe to the MorseMail eGroup
MorseMail can capture, via the mouse or a joystick port, your keying mark and space times and convert them to the MorseMail text format. You can copy the text to the clipboard and paste it into an email or web posting. An iambic keyer is provided or you can use a straight key or bug.
Currently, the MorseMail program captures keying through the mouse buttons or through the "trigger" buttons of the joystick port (15-pin connector on the sound card). While it is possible to key using the mouse buttons, it is better to use a "real" key or paddle. Check out Morse Express for some nice keys.
You can connect to the joystick port like this or you can buy an inexpensive USB mouse and modify it like this to wire your favorite key, paddle, or bug to the button switches. Some people have put a small headphone jack on the side of their main mouse for the connection.
If you are stuck without a key connection and using mouse buttons to key is driving you crazy, or if you simply want some receiving practice from a text source, you can load "plain" text from the clipboard (text without any "<" characters) or from the large edit box in the Memory section and it will be converted to Morse code at the current keyer speed. If the keyer speed is below 15 WPM, the Farnsworth method (15 WPM characters but longer spacing) will be utilized.
You are limited to about 500 characters of text (the maximum capacity of the memory). Any more than that will be discarded. You will see the edit box fill with the MorseMail text and then you can click Play to hear it.
Valid characters are ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÅÄÖÜ*1234567890+=/,?.É-!Ñ():;@'" with the @ used for SK. Thanks to Torbjörn Andersson, SM0RUF, for the nice code table.
The MorseMail program can also load the MorseMail formatted text from the clipboard so you can receive a MorseMail-coded email message or web posting, copy the text block to the clipboard, and then play it back via the PC sound system. During playback, you can adjust playback speed, tone frequency, and background noise to suit your preferences.
Note: Be sure to copy all text, including the complete
<MorseMail>and</MorseMail>tags and everything in between, from the email or web page to the clipboard.
The MorseMail program is simple and stand-alone. There is no fancy installation required. You download it using the links above. Just put it in some handy directory and make yourself a shortcut and you are ready to go. MorseMail requires a Windows 95, 98, 2000, or XP machine and a 16-bit sound card to operate properly. But it takes up only a quarter megabyte of disk space and runs with modest CPU and RAM resources.
In a future version, I plan to add the ability to feed an audio source (like a code practice oscillator or ham radio rig) into the sound board and it will envelope detect the tones and record the mark/space times. You will even be able to record well filtered CW from a receiver and then send it as an email in the compact MorseMail timing format.
My dream all along for brasspounder.com was to provide a "new ham band" facility where we could use the Internet for Morse code QSOs. MorseMail using email was a partial step in that direction and still a good option when synchronicity is not possible.
The MorseMail repeater function operates over the Internet and thus requires you be connected to use it. It operates through a specialized form of a HTTP server. I operate one at "brasspounder.com" but the program, MorseServe, is available for download and can easily be set up by anyone with a fixed public IP address.
You should enter your call or "handle" in the "My call" box first (restricted to letters, digits, and slash). If you don't have a radio callsign, make up a nice short "handle" with just letters. Also set the "Host" name to "brasspounder.com" (the default) or a name or IP address of another "repeater" server you want to use.
Each time you run MorseMail and want to use the transceiver (or if you change the "Host" name) you should drop down the "Ch" (channel) list and select the desired channel. The act of dropping down the list causes connection to the server and the list of available channels to be read. If you successfully "connect", you will see a message in the status line at the bottom that looks like "MorseServe yyyy.mm.dd" (the version of the server running) and your channel list in the drop-down box will get populated and you can selected the desired channel.
If, after a considerable timeout period (10's of seconds) you see an error message in the status line when you try to drop down the channel list, then either the server is not available, you aren't connected to the Internet, or you have entered the wrong host name.
To send a message, record using the normal technique, enter the call of the station you are sending to in the "TO call" edit box (if it doesn't already have the desired information), and then click the "Send ..." button. If you want to direct the message to everyone, use "ALL" in the "TO call". Once the message is sent (should be very quick) a "Msg time: <date><time>" appears in the status line below.
If you get an error message in the status line: "The connection with this Web page's server was lost" when you send a lengthy message, you should ignore it. This is a bug in the current system and your message did actually go through. This has been fixed as of version 2001.04.29.
If you are still in record mode (the "Record" check box is still checked) when you click "Send ...", your current recording is sent and then the memory is cleared so you can continue recording more.
Note: Since receiving messages is disabled while you are recording, make sure you click "off" the "Record" check box when you have finished your message.
If you click on the "Listen" check box, the program will keep checking for a new message allowing you to "listen" to the repeater for new traffic. This is done by checking the currently selected channel for new messages every few seconds (for the first few minutes and then slowing down to once per minute).
To listen to an earlier message, as of version 2001.04.28 you can drop down the "Msgs" dropdown message list and select the desired message. This causes the message to be fetched exactly as if it was a new incoming message.
Note: You must pick a message from the part of the list that dropped down to get it. Simply clicking on the message shown in the box that always shows, or clicking again on the little down arrow to the right, just closes the list back up without selecting anything. This can be useful if you simply want to see what is on the list.
Note: Picking a message from the "Msgs" list does not load the message into the "memory" but does place it in the edit box so you can use the "Load from edit box" button to load it into the memory. This is useful if you want to replay the message, although you could also simply reselect it from the "Msgs" drop down list.
Note: A received message isn't automatically loaded into memory just in case you have recorded something you want to send but then receive a message because the "Listen" mode is on. You can still send your recorded message even though you have heard a received message.
Each time the "Msgs" list is dropped down, the latest message list is fetched from the repeater. As of version 2001.04.29, the "Msgs" drop down list is automatically updated when new messages come in or when you send a message.
The "Stns" dropdown stations list (implemented with version 2001.04.28) is useful for monitoring the station list to see when another station is "listening". Stations are registered when they perform functions that fetch information from the repeater.
Note: When you are in "record" mode, the listen mode is temporarily suspended. Because of this you can often tell if another station is in the process of recording a response message by the fact that their time stamp in the station list stops progressing.
The "Browse" button should bring up your web browser with a dynamic page (updated every 10 seconds) that shows you what is going on in the repeater. Currently these web pages require Internet Explorer 5.0 or later to work. You can see the brasspounder.com message list here and you can see the brasspounder.com station list here
The transceiver function is part of the latest MorseMail program and you don't need any other program to use it. If you have a public IP address or want to experiment with the "repeater" on a LAN, you can download the MorseServe repeater program ZIP file from here. Technically, the repeater is an HTTP server listening on IP port 8873.
This is just a beginning for the transceiver feature. Being a ham radio project, it will take a while for this to evolve into something more polished. However, please send any feedback you can to help me improve it as I have time. I'm looking forward to some MorseMail QSOs!
While MorseMail is great for practice once you have mastered the Morse Code, it is not a program for learning from scratch. For that you need a teaching program like NuMorse:
All of this is very much in its formative stages and any feedback would be gladly accepted.
73, Harry, AB7TB
last edited 2007-09-02