Morse code: Ready to transmit
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The World Morse Code championships are fiendishly competitive. Contestants from many countries travel to Tunisia, where they face each other across tiny tapping machines in a competition hall silent but for the clicking. It is called High Speed Telegraphy - the skill and art of sending and receiving fast and accurately. The best practice three or four hours a day. Belarusians win almost every time, with stiff competition from Russia and Romania. But maybe this year it will be the Japanese or Kuwaiti competitors.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Stephen Coates and we're in Tunisia for a most unusual competition. |
| 0:11.1 | The High Speed Telegraphy World Championship. |
| 0:14.8 | Or transmitting and receiving Morse Code. |
| 0:20.0 | So I'm standing on a mosaic floor, the vast circle, |
| 0:25.2 | and it's in the lobby of this hotel, which is like a labyrinth. |
| 0:30.8 | And in some of the rooms on various levels, |
| 0:33.2 | are teams from around the world. |
| 0:35.1 | They've gathered here today, |
| 0:36.8 | and some of them are already fiendishly practicing and setting up their equipment. |
| 0:42.2 | My name is Ashraf Shahban. |
| 0:44.9 | We are here for worldwide high-speed telegraphy competition. |
| 0:50.4 | First time in Africa and first time in Arab country. |
| 0:53.6 | We are in Hammamette City,, the northern part of Tunisia, a bit south of capital, Tunis. |
| 1:01.3 | Ashraf has been working night and day to organise this unusual competition. |
| 1:06.5 | We're super excited about having the people here. |
| 1:10.3 | Most of the people, it's their first time |
| 1:13.1 | in Tunisia, even the first time in Africa as well. We don't sleep because of the excitement |
| 1:18.1 | before it was like months away, then weeks and then a few days to few hours away. And now |
| 1:24.3 | we are here and receiving competitors and visitors from worldwide. |
| 1:30.4 | This is the first time I've been to a Morse code competition. |
| 1:36.8 | Morse is an alphabet made up of dots and dashes. |
... |
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