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by 0xdeadbeefbabe 294 days ago
People who use it call it CW https://longislandcwclub.org/
1 comments

In the amateur radio community, yes. You probably know this, but for those who might not: CW isn’t totally synonymous with Morse code.

Morse is the encoding scheme; CW is one particular method of transmission. You could instead flash a light source, or you could use FM radio, or… I don’t know… use smoke signals! CW (‘continuous wave’) just means ‘pulsing a carrier wave on and off’.

Come to think of it, a good example of the distinction are the NDBs (non-directional beacons) that aircraft use for navigation. They transmit, repeatedly, an identifier in Morse code, but the signal is an audio range frequency (somewhere around 500Hz) amplitude modulated onto a (radio frequency) carrier rather than being the carrier itself being pulsed.

One difference is that, if you tune an ordinary AM radio to the carrier frequency, in the CW case you’d hear nothing. In this case, you’d hear the tone as intended.