How long does a particular bit of Morse code take to transmit at a certain speed? This is a simple question, but when sitting down trying to design schemes for 10-minute-window QRSS, it doesn’t always have a quick and simple answer. Yeah, you could sit down and draw the pattern on paper and add-up the dots and dashes, but why do on paper what you can do in code? The following speaks for itself. I made the top line say my call sign in Morse code (AJ4VD), and the program does the rest. I now see that it takes 570 seconds to transmit AJ4VD at QRSS 10 speed (ten second dots), giving me 30 seconds of free time to kill.

Here’s the Python code I whipped-up to generate the results:

xmit=" .- .--- ....- ...- -..  " #callsign
dot,dash,space,seq="_-","_---","_",""
for c in xmit:
    if c==" ": seq+=space
    elif c==".": seq+=dot
    elif c=="-": seq+=dash
print "QRSS sequence:n",seq,"n"
for sec in [1,3,5,10,20,30,60]:
    tot=len(seq)*sec
    print "QRSS %02d: %d sec (%.01f min)"%(sec,tot,tot/60.0)

How ready am I to implement this in the microchip? Pretty darn close. I’ve got a surprisingly stable software-based time keeping solution running continuously executing a “tick()” function thanks to hardware interrupts. It was made easy thanks to Frank Zhao’s AVR Timer Calculator. I could get it more exact by using a /1 prescaler instead of a /64, but this well within the range of acceptability so I’m calling it quits!