Turning on any of my vintage shortwave radios always brings some CW or Morse Code. In the 60s I learned the basic of Morse Code but I never really learned all the dots and dashes. To me, it always seemed like a tedious and complicated means of communication.
I know in the early days of radio, it served a purpose, but these days it's pretty obsolete. I recently learned that getting a Ham License no longer requires Morse Code. Honestly I wanted to get a ham license in the 60s but never did because of the morse code requirement back then.
I also have heard that most of the morse code heard on shortwave radios these days is NOT created by hand pressing a key, but rather done with machines (I'm not sure how it's done).
Anyhow, I was wondering if there is any sort of software that will decode morse code and turn it into plain text? I assume one would need to input the radio signal into a computer, via microphone or using a direct cord to input. Then software would decode it and print the text on the screen.
Does such a thing exist?
One further thing. I have noticed that most CW heard on the air these days is so fast that few people could manually decode it. I guess that is all machine created code, which in my opinion, needs a machine to decode it too.....
NOTE: Morse Code is not to be confused with Horse Code, as seen on the Mr.Ed tv series, in which Mr Ed communicated using short and long whinnies in series.... :) (Mr Ed was the greatest).