Morse code / CW
termnetworkingops culture
Encoding of characters as short and long tones, sent as an on-off keyed carrier and known on the air as CW.
It survives because of an engineering fact rather than nostalgia: a trained ear extracts Morse from noise that renders voice unintelligible, in a fraction of the bandwidth. When propagation collapses, CW is often the only thing still getting through. It is sent with a straight key, a paddle driving an electronic keyer, or a computer, and the Q-code abbreviations that grew around it, like QTH for location and QRM for interference, became the shared vocabulary of the whole hobby.
Also known as: CW, continuous wave, Morse