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by myself248 1177 days ago
Morse code is alive and well, especially during contests where efficiency means performance. There are a few reasons:

It has high spectral efficiency; a CW transmission is only a few Hertz wide on the spectrum, whereas even SSB voice needs several kHz. This lets you use very narrow receive filters, to cut out adjacent noise and make contacts in difficult conditions.

It can achieve useful communication at very low power, with very simple equipment. Look up "qrp cw kit" and you can get $15 transmitters that you solder together from parts in a few minutes, and these aren't VLSI parts like some wifi chip or whatever, these are single discrete components. Hams love hand-built equipment, or at least the theoretical ability to use hand-built equipment, and QRP (low-power operation) is a hugely popular challenge.

It occupies a sweet spot where it's simple enough to encode by hand and decode by ear, but also easy enough for computers to operate. So there's a wide range of automation available, from whole-band decoders to keyboard-interactive QSOs, or you can go completely bare-handed if you prefer. That makes it appeal to more people than a more modern computer-required mode like PSK31 or FT8. (Those have even higher spectral efficiency, though, so they're popular in their own way.)

Out of curiosity, what does the CQ in your username refer to?