"morsecode.me" Morse based chat rooms.

Ham4CW

Administrator
I came across a website while on my lunch break at work, which seems to be a loosely similar idea to CW-COM.

http://morsecode.me/?room=1

It's split in to 'rooms' of which I think there were 6, plus a few other 'special' ones.

Usual keying using period button, or mouse  left button over the "Key" legend towards the bottom of the page.

While using the Samsung laptop at work, running Linux, I found that it would also key with the space bar. Just tried it here on a Lenovo laptop running Linux and it didn't function, only the period button and mouse left button over "Key".

Just using the space bar at work I found it was excellent at reading the CW sent, but, I found that the side-tone was intermittent to non existant, or else it lags behind. I ended up turning the volume fully down and just sending by touch.

Also puzzling was the intermittent 'received' tone, it just seemed to randomly beep with no connection to what was on screen.

The initial "Room 1" seems like a free for all, with very little actually sending, as though visitors were trying to read the list of characters down the side of the screen and send from the list. The higher rooms appeared empty, or else indicated 1 or 2 other users present, but no one was sending. I did try a few QRZ's with no response.

Something I did like was that because you can use the left mouse button, then any old mouse could be modified to accept a mono socket in parallel with the left button switch, and you could then plug in a straight key to send with.

Because it was a general melee in the first room you could not really tell if the problems were due to several users all trying to 'send' at the same time, or if the script is just very buggy.

If nothing else it might be OK to use as a monitor while conducting sending practice.

I need to try it out on a Windows machine though, in case the weird effects were due to it not 'liking' Linux.


73, Mark... :w:
 
Right, well, I tried a fairly fast Windows OS laptop, and the results were a little better but still not perfect.

The 'received' Morse tone seemed to be chopped or clipped, and the 'transmit' side tone had a lot of latency. It might be that the 'side tone' was being generated by the site itself and not locally in the machine here, so allowing for the round trip to the server and back maybe that's why there was a delay.

Another 'effect' seen a few times was that I sent a full sentence and the server showed that I was keying, but when the sending was finished the placeholder was empty, with only the system allocated username appearing (no message next to it).

Too glitchy by far to be of any real use by the looks of things, but the idea of CW over the internet is appealing all the same.

73, Mark... :w:
 
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