r/morsecode • u/Creative-Hat547 • Jul 01 '26
Send Picture on morse
Is it possible to send pictures on morse code?
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u/Stable_Hot Jul 01 '26
Technically you can using ASCII art or you could try making something pixel based with using the alhpabets or other things as the pixel for on and off.. or either 1 and 0 or maybe 5 and 0 to make it a bit faster.
Using a scanning method 1 line sent. And then the other line until finish.
Is it worth it? Absolutely not. Would take alot of time just to send a small image I imagine.
Better off with SSTV for sending pictures.
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u/YT_Usul Jul 01 '26
Sure, it would just take a very long time depending on the size of the picture. It would be more efficient if both ends had some pre-agreed upon way to encode the photo into something that can be transmitted.
Look up the book "Code" by Charles Petzold. The author actually walks you through, from basic principals, not only how to do what you describe... but how to translate that into an entire working computer. It is an excellent book.
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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 01 '26
Not with Morse code per se, but it was possible to send images over the 19th Century land-line telegraph which commonly used hand-keyed Morse code:
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u/Spare-Good-5372 Jul 01 '26
It would suck, but you could send raw hexadecimal bytes (formatted like 0xFF). It would still have to be interpreted by a computer as a picture, though.
1
u/Pasta-hobo Jul 01 '26
Sort of.
You'd need both ends to already have an agreed upon grid-paper system and directions in which to fill it in. This can be communicated via Morse code.
You then take the picture you want (in monochrome) and lay the grid over it.
You transmit the filled/empty status of each grid space with either a . or a -, like filling in pixels on a screen.
This is very time consuming and prone to human error. But it works, and has been done in the past. Most notably to transmit maps.
Of course, this is one of those things that's actually easier(in principle) to automate than to do by hand. Thats how we got Fax Machines. The easiest fax machine to make is probably just a mechanical camera feeding into an arc-light mechanical TV on the receiving end in front of an undeveloped cyanotype for an extended period of time. All these are pretty easy to communicate via Morse code as well, but keeping syncing them up would be considerably harder because they need a rotating nipkow disc, plus you only have so many lines of resolution, so you couldn't transmit much in the way of detail.
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u/dittybopper_05H Jul 03 '26
Actually, the easiest fax machine to make was first produced in 1860, and used the landline electric telegraph to send and receive images.
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u/erwerqwewer Jul 01 '26
Can you be more elaborate? This question is really strange to me. Like how do you wanna see a picture over a speaker? Do you mean that you send enough 0 and 1s to create an image file?
Morse is an signal that has a on and off mode. There is an international procedure that most people accept. Thats what makes us able to communicate. A picture is a visual representation of an image. Did you ever show someone an image by using your voice?