Is Morse Code Still Used?

Aviation: every VOR beacon transmits morse code

VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Range) navigation beacons are the backbone of instrument flight worldwide. Every VOR continuously transmits a two- or three-letter identifier in morse code at 1,020 Hz, repeating on a loop so that any aircraft receiver tuned to the correct frequency can identify the station at any time.

Examples are easy to find. The VOR near San Francisco International Airport transmits SFO in morse — ... ..-. ---. The VOR serving London Heathrow transmits LON — -.. --- -.. Pilots tune their navigation receivers, listen to the audio, and confirm the beacon they're navigating toward before relying on it for instrument approaches.

This is not optional heritage. ICAO Annex 10, Volume I still requires VOR morse identification as of 2024. Any pilot studying for an FAA or EASA instrument rating must be able to identify VOR beacons by their morse audio — it is on the written examination and it is tested on the practical check ride.

NDB (Non-Directional Beacons) also transmit morse identifiers, and thousands remain active globally, particularly outside Europe and North America where GPS redundancy is lower. NDBs operate at medium frequency, they penetrate weather, and their morse identifiers follow the same principle as VOR: every beacon announces itself in dot-dash form. In parts of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, NDB approaches are still primary instrument approaches for many airports.

So every commercial flight that uses VOR navigation — which is essentially every instrument flight in the world — is technically decoding morse code via its navigation receiver. The technology is transparent, but the underlying signal is morse.

Amateur radio: the most active use of morse code today

CW (continuous wave — morse keyed directly onto a radio transmitter) is one of the most popular modes in amateur radio, more than 80 years after voice radio became widely practical. This is counterintuitive until you understand why CW survives technically, not just sentimentally.

Major CW contests draw large fields of participants every year:

• CQ WW CW (November) — the largest amateur radio contest in the world by participation. In recent years, over 9,000 individual operators submitted logs. CW participation regularly exceeds the SSB (voice) division.
• ARRL Sweepstakes CW (November) — US-only, but one of the highest-activity weekends for North American CW operators.
• CQ WPX CW (May) and IARU HF Championship — both routinely draw thousands of CW entries.

Why does CW survive voice radio? Three concrete reasons, not nostalgia:

• Narrowest bandwidth. A CW signal occupies 100–150 Hz of spectrum. A voice SSB signal occupies approximately 2,700 Hz. On a crowded amateur radio band, you can fit 18 CW stations in the space one voice station needs. On popular HF bands like 40m and 20m, this matters enormously.
• Best signal-to-noise ratio. An experienced CW operator can copy signals 10–15 dB weaker than a voice signal would need to be to remain intelligible. CW contacts routinely happen at ranges that are simply impossible for voice, because the human brain is very good at pattern-matching dot-dash sequences in noise.
• No technology barrier for QRP. A 5-watt CW transmitter and a wire antenna can make contacts across continents. QRP (low-power) operators — those running 5 watts or less — routinely contact 100+ countries using CW. The same 5 watts on voice would rarely be useful beyond a few hundred miles.

The amateur radio community has built large active CW-specific organisations: FISTS (UK-based, 14,000+ members), Straight Key Century Club (SKCC) (30,000+ members worldwide), and the Morse Preservation Society. These groups run regular on-air events, award certificates for CW contacts, and maintain active mailing lists and forums. CW “nets” — scheduled on-air gatherings of morse operators — happen daily on every HF band.

Crucially: in 2003, the ITU removed the mandatory CW proficiency requirement from amateur radio licensing worldwide. Most countries followed. A new licensee no longer needs to learn morse to get on the air. And yet CW activity has not declined — if anything, interest has increased as a voluntary “challenge mode.” Operators choose CW now, which says something about its technical merits that regulatory obligation could not.

Assistive technology: morse code for people who cannot speak

Morse code is one of the most accessible communication systems ever designed for people with severe motor impairments, for a simple reason: you only need to produce two distinct signals. Dot and dash. Short and long. Any reliable switch, sensor, or body movement maps directly onto morse.

Eye-blink morse is used by people with locked-in syndrome — a condition caused by ALS, brainstem stroke, or Guillain-Barré syndrome — in which a person is fully conscious and cognitively intact but has no voluntary muscle movement except eye movement. Eye-tracking systems and blink-detection software can be configured to interpret blinks of different durations as dots and dashes. This allows people with no functional voluntary movement except their eyes to spell words, communicate needs, and in some cases compose full documents.

The principle became widely known through the case of journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, who dictated his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking as his assistant read through a frequency-sorted alphabet. That's not morse technically, but it's the same idea: reduce communication to a single binary channel, and a person with severe motor impairment can communicate.

Google's Morse Code for Gboard, released in 2018 for Android, allows users to type using just two keys — dot and dash — or through eye-tracking switches that generate the same inputs. People with motor disabilities use it daily to operate smartphones and tablets that would otherwise require fine motor control they do not have.

Head-movement and breath-switch morse systems allow quadriplegic users to communicate at speeds of 15–20 words per minute with training. That is faster than many alternative augmentative communication (AAC) systems can manage. The simplicity of morse — two signal types, learned patterns — is precisely what makes it practical for this application, where complex interfaces fail.

Military and special operations

Several militaries retain CW capability for specific operational requirements where modern digital communication has genuine vulnerabilities.

Low probability of intercept. CW is significantly harder to direction-find than voice. A skilled operator running a low-power QRP rig can transmit intelligence from a denied area with a minimal radio frequency signature. The signal is brief, the bandwidth is tiny, and the transmission can be completed in seconds before a hostile signals unit can get a bearing. This remains operationally relevant for special forces units.

Submarine communication. ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) submarine communication systems transmit at frequencies that penetrate seawater to depth. The physics of ELF mean data rates are extremely low — a few characters per minute. Morse-like encoding — or pre-arranged morse codeword systems — are practical at these rates. The US Navy's Project Sanguine and its operational successor used ELF transmission to submarines on submerged patrol.

Backup communications. When satellite links are jammed, GPS is denied, and digital radio systems are compromised, HF radio using skywave propagation can still bridge global distances. CW on HF is the most reliable mode for this because it works at the lowest signal levels. Some special forces units train CW explicitly as a backup communication mode for denied-environment operations.

Numbers stations. Several governments operate shortwave “numbers stations” — broadcasts of encoded messages to agents in the field. Some use voice, some use morse. Several CW numbers stations remained active into the 2020s, documented by signals intelligence researchers and the Conet Project. These are one-way encrypted communications: the format is morse, the content is unbreakable without the one-time pad.

Maritime: the post-GMDSS picture

In 1999, GMDSS (Global Maritime Distress and Safety System) became mandatory for commercial vessels under SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea). This removed the requirement for ship radio officers to hold a CW proficiency certificate, ending mandatory shipboard morse for commercial shipping after approximately 150 years.

This is the event most people refer to when they say “morse code is dead.” It is not a complete picture. Commercial shipping CW ended. Everything else continued.

The ITU distress frequency 500 kHz (international CW calling and distress) was not formally abolished — it was simply no longer required. Some coast guard stations continued monitoring it into the 2010s. The SOS signal (... --- ...) remains an ITU-defined distress procedure and is universally understood by any radio operator worldwide.

Amateur radio maritime mobile operators — sailors with amateur licences — use CW for long-passage communication. Pacific Maritime Net and other ocean-crossing nets run on HF, and CW-capable stations participate. For sailors on long passages out of satellite phone range, HF CW is still a practical long-range communication tool.

Maritime navigation also retains morse in a physical form: many lighthouses and light vessels flash morse identifiers in their light patterns. Buoys flash their morse ID. These light-based identifiers parallel aviation VOR identifiers — the same concept, different medium — and remain active as navigational aids.

Other modern uses

Morse code survives in several other domains that rarely appear in the same discussion:

• Scouting programmes. Many scouting organisations worldwide include morse code as a badge skill. In the US, Boy Scouts have historically taught morse as part of signalling merit badges. The emphasis on self-reliant communication — what if radio fails? — keeps the skill in outdoor education curricula.
• Puzzle hunts and escape rooms. Morse code is one of the most popular cipher layers in organised puzzle competitions. The annual MIT Mystery Hunt, the MITMH, and thousands of escape room designs use morse as a puzzle element because it is widely known enough to be solvable and obscure enough to be a genuine challenge.
• Decorative and personal. Morse code jewellery — bracelets, necklaces, rings — and tattoos encoding personal messages, names, or dates have become commercially significant. This is almost certainly the largest-volume “use” of morse code today by number of people who encounter it. A person wearing a morse bracelet spelling out a name or phrase is using it as a private symbolic language, which is what code is for.
• Film and sound design. Morse code sound effects are a reliable atmospheric choice for productions. Interstellar (2014) uses morse code in its bookshelf sequence as a plot mechanism. Gravity (2013) includes a CW operator scene. Battlefield and military video games regularly include morse easter eggs and in-game puzzles. The signal has become a cultural shorthand for encrypted or hidden communication.
• Broadcast tower lighting. FAA regulations require aviation warning lights on tall structures. In older installations, these lights sometimes flash morse identifiers. LED strobe systems have replaced many of them, but the principle — a tower announcing itself in code — mirrors aviation VOR and maritime light identification.

Why morse has not been replaced

The question “is morse code still used” often comes with an implicit assumption that something as old as the telegraph era should have been fully superseded. The reason it has not been fully superseded is that morse code has genuine technical advantages in specific situations.

No other communication mode operates as effectively at the margins: minimal power, minimal bandwidth, maximum noise, one-bit input. These are not historical curiosities. They are real operational parameters that come up in aviation (identifying a beacon without internet), amateur radio (working weak signals), assistive technology (the user can only blink), and military (operating in a denied environment).

When conditions are good — full power, full bandwidth, clear channel — voice and digital modes are faster and easier. Morse is not the best-case-scenario tool. It is the worst-case-scenario tool that still works when everything else has failed or been ruled out. That is why it is still taught, still licensed, still transmitted, and still received every day in 2024.

Where to go from here

• How does morse code work — the full dot-dash system explained, from dit/dah timing to prosigns.
• Learn morse code — the 90-day Koch method path from zero to operating speed.
• History of morse code — from Samuel Morse's 1837 telegraph alphabet to GMDSS, GPS, and modern assistive technology.
• Morse code practice — live audio drills to build copy speed.
• Morse code alphabet — the complete A–Z and 0–9 reference.