About this site

A Morse code translator, a reference, and a set of pages about the code, built so that the one thing a site like this can be wrong about is the one thing it is checked for.

What it is built on

Every code on this site comes from one table: ITU-R M.1677-1, the International Telecommunication Union's Recommendation that defines international Morse code. Sections 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 give the letters, the figures and the punctuation, and that is what is here. Where a chart on another site offers a character the Recommendation does not define, this site does not offer it. The exclamation mark is the usual example: a code for it circulates widely, it is an American convention, and the ITU has never adopted it. If you type one into the translator, it stays in the output as an exclamation mark.

Timing follows the same document. A dash is three units, the gap inside a character is one, between characters three, between words seven; the unit at a given speed is derived from the PARIS standard word. Farnsworth spacing is the one addition, and it only stretches the gaps, never the characters.

How it is checked

No code on any page is typed by hand. The chart, the per-character sections, the codes in headings and in titles, and the pictures are all generated from the same table the translator uses, at build time. The build refuses to complete if a literal code is found in page copy. That is not a promise about carefulness; it is a check that runs every time.

The audio is tested the same way, in the other direction. The sound of a message is rendered to samples and read back into text by the decoder that powers the reader page, at three speeds and with noise added, and the build fails if the text does not come back. A dash that was slightly too short, or a gap slightly too long, would surface there before it surfaced for you.

What the checks cannot cover is prose. The explanations on these pages were written with care and read against the Recommendation, and they can still be wrong the way any explanation can. If you find a mistake, we would like to know about it.

What it deliberately leaves out

Characters outside the Recommendation, as above. Accented letters beyond the handful the ITU defines; the rest are sent as their base letter, as a receiving operator expects. Any claim about your progress that would need an account to make. There are no accounts.

What it never collects

Nothing you type into the translator, the reader or the trainer leaves your device. The reader opens your microphone only when you press the button and decodes the sound in the page; nothing is uploaded. There is no cookie, no tracking script, and no visitor identifier of any kind. The server counts page views in daily totals by page and by the kind of site that sent you, which is enough to know what people read and not enough to know who anyone is.

Who

This site is published by Morse Hut. It does not claim credentials it does not have and does not present an author it does not have; the argument for trusting the tables is the checking described above, which you can reason about, not a name.