Its not morse code.
Hi everyone, I've not read the entire thread (who has time?), however, I've spent some time listening to the sounds coming from the UA from recordings on-line.
I don't know who told you that it was morse code or even distorted morse code. IMHO it certainly is not.
I did morse code in the military for many years over long range HF skywave links, and I'm really not hearing the morse code in the UA's sound.
Please note : I'm only listening at normal audio speeds.
EDIT: Ah, this took me too long to write on my dodgy internet connection. Will leave it here anyway, in case I need to link some of the rationale ever again
So, I pitched the idea of morse
a long time back, but it didn't get traction, nor did I have the resources to push through. After seeing suggestion it was "coming back into consideration",
I repushed the idea with the help of others and is now pretty accepted. With that said, let me explain a few things, and how they've come about which might clear things up.
- Firstly, since you haven't read the whole thread, here's the
alphabet I produced from the UA chittering. That alphabet is derived from a collection of recordings from the community (mostly Wishblend and Ratking's), who helpfully recorded the UA at enough different places to provide the
whole alphabet and numbers. The critical thing with the alphabet is that if I was wrong at all with extracting the letters, there is no way I would've been able to come up with an alphabet, as it took over 20 recordings to do, in some cases extracting a single audio cut. But I was able to spot it almost first go every time.
(PS Wishblend, if I have to listen to COL 285 SECTOR in UA chitter ever again, I'm gonna get all hulk up in here....
)
- Next, I verified the accuracy of this alphabet by using it to synthesise a signal for
EKURU A 1 , a location which had not yet been recorded. After producing this, Wishblend went off and
recorded the UA outside EKURU A 1. Although not a perfect replication (due to the variances that can occur in each recording), it's structurally identical, which is as close a proof as you can get.
- Some of those variances are in pitch and tone, but again, they are structurally the same. Some variances are also from the actual morse encoded version itself. If you listen to the "P" sample, it's *almost* nothing like an actual morse P. This is why the various morse-decoding software this has been passed through doesn't detect anything. It'd be like taking Chinese text and expecting sense when you pass it through a Japanese text decoder. Their scripts are similar, but they aren't the same. However..
- It's not *strictly* morse. It's much easier for everyone to just call it morse, rather than what it actually is; a stylised variation of morse. If you're listening for *pure* morse, or even distorted morse (where the signals are the same, but just distorted slightly) you won't hear it. It's probably much more accurate to say this is something
*based* off morse, as my initial work assumed it was morse *with variance* in it. Thus, the issues with the P sound.
- Other variations that can occur is, for example, that a "dit" is sometimes a "wip", "wup" or "dat" sound (the 'dat' is really uncommon and only appears in a few letters). This is best heard in the cuts for
"5" (dit dit dit dit dit) and
"4" (dit dit dit dit dah). In the recordings, respectively, they sound more like "wip wip wip" and "wip wip warp".
- The best way to explain this is as a language effect rule, similar to what we do with the english language. "Phone" contains "P" (pee) and "H" (aich), but these are not heard when you pronounce the word phone. In this case, they make a "fuh" sound. But just because you don't hear a "Pee" or an "aich" doesn't mean it's not present. I think similar rules might apply to the "morse", for example, three or more sequential dits will follow a "high-low-high..." sequence. That said, it's not something I'm willing to put effort in to breaking down, nor am capable of doing it.
I hope that helps. I know there will be people out here who will never be convinced it's morse, and if I could go back in time and somehow pitch it in a way that didn't claim it was morse, but instead based off morse (and thus, can be decoded like morse) I might have, because people do go listening for morse (like in the nav beacons) and can't hear it, nor can software detect it, and so think it isn't.
