Morse Code Machine
A Morse code machine is any device that turns a message into the on-off signal pattern Samuel Morse’s system defines — historically a telegraph key and sounder, today usually software. The machine below is the software kind. You type a message, or speak it, and it sends the message as real Morse: an audible CW tone, a flashing light, or phone vibration, timed to the ITU standard of 1 unit for a dot and 3 units for a dash.
It runs in the browser. Nothing to install, no account, no radio required. If you only want text converted to dots and dashes on screen, the Morse code translator is the faster tool. Use this page when you want to send — to hear the rhythm, watch the light, and build the timing sense that reading dots and dashes off a screen never gives you.
How to send your first message
The controls default to settings that work, but they are worth understanding rather than leaving alone.
- Type your message in the message box. Letters, numbers and most punctuation are supported. Anything outside the International Morse character set is skipped rather than mangled.
- Pick an output. Sound plays a CW tone. Light flashes the screen, which is how Morse is actually sent ship to ship by signal lamp. Vibrate uses phone haptics — useful on a bus, or for practicing without sound.
- Set the pitch. Most operators settle between 500 and 800 Hz. Around 600 Hz is the common preference: high enough to cut through noise, low enough not to fatigue you over a long session.
- Set the speed. Speed is in words per minute, measured against the reference word PARIS. Start at 12–15 WPM. If you find yourself counting individual dots, the speed is too low, not too high — see the Farnsworth note below.
- Press send and listen without looking at the screen. That last part matters more than any setting.
Sending with your voice
The microphone button routes speech recognition into the encoder: you speak, the browser transcribes, and the transcript is sent as Morse. It is the fastest way to get a long message out of the machine, and it is genuinely useful for demonstrations, for accessibility, and for anyone who wants to hear what an ordinary sentence sounds like in CW without typing it.
Three honest limitations:
- Your audio leaves the browser. Web speech recognition is handled by the platform vendor — Google on Chrome and Android, Apple on Safari and iOS, Microsoft on Edge. Their privacy policies apply to what you say, not this site’s. There is no offline mode.
- Recognition is not Morse-aware. Say “S O S” and you may get “sauce.” Proper nouns, callsigns and Q codes transcribe badly. Check the text before sending.
- Mobile Chrome drops the microphone. Android Chrome suspends microphone access after a short idle period to save battery. When it reconnects you may hear a repeated permission beep. This is browser behavior, not a fault in the tool — tap the mic again to resume, or switch to typing for long sessions.
Firefox does not implement the Web Speech API for recognition, so voice input is unavailable there. Typing, sound, light and vibration all work normally.
The timing, precisely
Every element of Morse is defined against a single unit: the length of one dot. Get the ratios right and the message is readable at any speed; get them wrong and it is noise, however clean each individual character sounds.
| Element | Length | At 20 WPM |
|---|---|---|
| Dot (dit) | 1 unit | 60 ms |
| Dash (dah) | 3 units | 180 ms |
| Gap between dots and dashes inside a letter | 1 unit | 60 ms |
| Gap between letters | 3 units | 180 ms |
| Gap between words | 7 units | 420 ms |
Unit length in milliseconds is 1200 / WPM. At 20 WPM that gives a 60 ms dot; at 10 WPM, 120 ms. The reference word PARIS is exactly 50 units long including its trailing word space, which is why WPM means anything at all — sending PARIS twenty times in a minute is 20 WPM by definition. The full derivation is on the Morse code timing rules page.
The gap most beginners get wrong is the 3-unit letter gap. Compress it and -.-. stops being C and starts sounding like -. followed by -., which is N N. Nothing about the individual dots and dashes changed. Only the silence did.
If you are counting dots, slow the gaps — not the characters
Sending everything slowly teaches you to count elements, which is a habit that caps you around 10 WPM and then has to be unlearned. The fix is Farnsworth timing: keep each character at full speed, typically 18–20 WPM, and stretch the gaps between characters until the effective rate is comfortable. You learn each letter as one sound rather than a countable sequence, and that recognition transfers when you speed up later. The method is named after Donald R. “Russ” Farnsworth, W6TTB.
Once individual characters are automatic and you are working on hearing whole words, Wordsworth timing stretches only the word gaps and leaves character and inter-character spacing at full speed.
What a Morse code machine was before it was software
The phrase covers about a century of very different hardware, and search results tend to blur them together. They are worth separating.
The register (1840s)
Morse’s original receiving instrument was a recorder, not a speaker. An electromagnet pressed a stylus against a moving paper tape, embossing the incoming signal as short and long marks that an operator read visually afterward. The dot-and-dash notation everyone recognizes is literally a description of what those marks looked like on tape.
The sounder (1850s onward)
Operators quickly discovered they could read the clicking of the armature faster than they could read the tape, so the recorder was abandoned in favor of a sounder — a plain electromagnet whose click-clack the operator decoded by ear. This is the shift that made Morse an aural skill, and it is why practicing by sound rather than by sight is not an affectation. It is how the system was actually used for its entire working life.
Keys: straight, bug, paddle
On the sending side, a straight key is a simple lever — you form every dot and dash by hand, and the timing is entirely yours. A bug, the semi-automatic key Horace Martin patented as the Vibroplex in 1904, uses a weighted pendulum to generate a string of dots mechanically while dashes stay manual, which relieves the wrist injury that plagued heavy straight-key operators. An iambic paddle paired with an electronic keyer generates both, perfectly timed, from two contacts.
Keyboard keyers (1970s–80s)
The last generation of dedicated hardware let operators type. The HAL Communications DKB-2010 was one of these: a keyboard terminal from the Urbana, Illinois firm that supplied much of the amateur RTTY market, which encoded typed characters into CW or RTTY for transmission. The appeal was consistency — machine-perfect spacing at a speed no hand could sustain — and the cost was that operators could no longer recognize each other by “fist,” the small timing idiosyncrasies that make a hand-sent signal identifiable. The machine on this page belongs to that lineage rather than to the straight key’s.
None of this is only history. Morse remains in active amateur use, is still recognized by the ITU for distress signaling, and identifiers on aviation navigation beacons are still transmitted in Morse for pilots to verify by ear.
A practice sequence that works
Sending and receiving are separate skills and improve at different rates. Most people plateau because they practice the easier one.
- Two weeks, five letters. Start with E, T, A, N and I. Send them at 18 WPM character speed with Farnsworth gaps, eyes off the screen, until you name each one without hesitating. Adding letters faster than this is the most common reason people stall.
- Add letters in frequency order, not alphabetical. Alphabetical order groups similar-sounding characters together and makes confusion worse. The Morse code alphabet page gives the full set.
- Practice on the light and the vibration too. They are the same timing through a different sense, and switching between them exposes gaps in your rhythm that sound alone hides.
- Close the gaps last. When character recognition is automatic, reduce the Farnsworth spacing a word or two per minute at a time rather than jumping the character speed.
Quick reference
Letters:
- E =
.— the shortest character, because it is the most common letter in English. Morse was frequency-optimized from the start. - T =
- - A =
.- - B =
-... - C =
-.-. - Q =
--.-— one of the longest, and one of the rarest.
Common sequences:
- SOS =
... --- ...— sent as one unbroken character with no letter gaps, which is why it is written S̅O̅S̅ and is not an abbreviation for anything. - HELLO =
.... . .-.. .-.. --- - HELP =
.... . .-.. .--. - CQ =
-.-. --.-— the general call, meaning “seeking you,” still used every day on the amateur bands.
The full character set including punctuation, numerals and prosigns is on the Morse code chart.
Troubleshooting
- No sound on iPhone. iOS blocks audio until the page receives a tap. Press any control once, then send. Check the physical silent switch as well — it mutes Web Audio output on Safari.
- The microphone stops after a minute. Expected on Android Chrome. Tap the mic to resume, or type instead for anything long.
- Repeated beeping when voice input restarts. That is the browser’s own permission tone firing on each reconnection, not a signal from the tool.
- Voice input button missing. You are probably on Firefox, which does not implement speech recognition. Use Chrome, Safari or Edge.
- Vibration does nothing on desktop. Correct — the Vibration API needs a device with a haptic motor. Use sound or light.
Frequently Asked Questions
A Morse code machine is any device that converts a message into Morse code’s timed on-off signals, or converts those signals back into text. Historically that meant a telegraph key and sounder, or later a keyboard keyer such as the HAL DKB-2010. Today it usually means software: you type or speak a message and the machine sends it as tone, light or vibration at a chosen words-per-minute speed.
Set the character speed to 18 to 20 words per minute and stretch the gaps between characters instead, a method called Farnsworth timing. Sending everything slowly teaches you to count individual dots and dashes, which caps most learners near 10 WPM and has to be unlearned later. Keeping characters fast means you learn each letter as a single sound from the start.
Between 500 and 800 Hz, with roughly 600 Hz the most common preference. That range sits where hearing is sensitive and the tone stays distinct from background noise without becoming tiring over a long practice session.
Because the silence carries as much information as the signal. A gap of 1 unit separates elements within a letter, 3 units separates letters, and 7 units separates words. Compress the letter gap and C, sent as dash dot dash dot, is heard as N followed by N. The dots and dashes are unchanged; only the timing tells them apart.
Yes. Browser speech recognition is processed by the platform vendor — Google, Apple or Microsoft depending on your browser — so their privacy policies govern the audio, and there is no offline option. Typed input is processed entirely in your browser and never leaves your device.
Yes. It remains in regular amateur radio use, the ITU still recognizes the SOS distress signal, and aviation navigation beacons transmit their identifiers in Morse so pilots can verify by ear which station they are receiving.
