Yes, but in fewer places than the internet suggests, and rarely the places people name. Morse code lost its two biggest jobs decades ago. What it kept is small, real and still working every day.
Gone: the maritime distress role, which passed to GMDSS, an automated system;
and the licence gate, since most countries no longer test Morse before granting
an amateur radio licence. Still here: amateur radio CW, the identifiers that
aviation and marine navigation beacons repeat over the air, Morse as a
switch-access input on mainstream phones, scouting programmes that teach it to
millions of children, and ...---... as the one pattern a stranger might
recognise with no chart in front of them.
So the honest answer is not "yes" or "no". It is that Morse stopped being infrastructure and became a tool that people pick up because it does something nothing else does as cheaply.
Hearing beats reading here. MorseLab turns any text into a tone, a torch flash or a vibration, free and offline.
The two jobs Morse lost
Maritime distress. For most of the twentieth century a ship in trouble sent
...---... and a human being with headphones on heard it. That watch no longer
exists. GMDSS replaced it with automated distress alerting, and no coast station
is listening for a hand-sent signal. If you are on a boat, the radio, the beacon
and the phone are what summon help.
The licence test. Passing a Morse receiving test used to be the price of a licence that let you transmit on the shortwave bands. Most countries dropped that requirement. Anyone who predicted that would be the end of Morse on the air was wrong, and the reason is worth sitting with: once nobody was forced to learn it, the people still sending it were the ones who wanted to. The mode got smaller and healthier at the same time.
Those two losses are why "is Morse code still used" gets asked at all. The answer people half-remember is the maritime one, and that part really is over.
Where it is genuinely still used
| Use | Who | What you would actually notice |
|---|---|---|
| Amateur radio CW | Licensed operators, worldwide, daily | A single steady tone switched on and off, in a very narrow slice of a band |
| Navigation beacons | Aviation and marine | A short identifier repeating in Morse, under or beside the navigation signal |
| Accessibility input | People who type with switches | Two switches — one dot, one dash — instead of a keyboard |
| Scouting and schools | Millions of children, Indonesia especially | Whistle blasts, flags and torches in a field, not radios |
| Emergency improvisation | Anyone with a light | ...---..., repeated, from a window or a hillside |
Every row on that list is checkable. Nothing on it involves a secret military channel, and that omission is deliberate.
Why CW survives on the air
CW is what radio operators call Morse: a carrier wave, keyed on and off. It is the simplest thing a transmitter can do, and that simplicity is exactly why it still beats voice in bad conditions.
A voice signal has to carry a whole band of audio frequencies. A keyed tone is one frequency, present or absent. That means the receiver can be tuned to a very narrow slice of the band and throw away everything either side of it, and noise is spread across the whole band, so a narrower slice lets in less of it. Then the last filter is the operator: a human ear picks a rhythmic tone out of hiss long after the same signal buried under a voice would be unintelligible.
The practical result is that a CW station running very low power, on a wire thrown over a tree, makes contacts that voice at the same power cannot. That is the whole appeal. It is not nostalgia; it is more distance per watt.
Speeds are ordinary. A comfortable conversational pace is around 20 words per minute, which by the standard formula — dot length in seconds equals 1.2 divided by WPM — is a 60 ms dot. Slower operators run 12 WPM, a 100 ms dot. A beginner's first contacts often happen at 5 WPM, a 240 ms dot, and nobody minds.
If you want to hear this for yourself, Morse code for ham radio covers what a CW contact actually sounds like and what gets said in one.
The shorthand that is still in daily use
Morse on the air is not sent as plain English. It runs on abbreviations, because every character costs time. These are the ones you would hear inside an hour of listening, and they are all still current.
SOS ...---...
QTH --.- - ....
QSL --.- ... .-..
QRZ --.- .-. --..
QSY --.- ... -.--
AR .-.-.
SK ...-.-
BT -...-Spaces separate letters. A word gap is written /. Four of those entries are
not spelled out letter by letter: ...---... and the prosigns AR, SK and BT are
sent as single unbroken runs with no letter gaps inside them, which is what
makes them distinct from the letters they are built from.
| Code | Means |
|---|---|
| QTH | My location is / what is your location |
| QSL | Received, acknowledged |
| QRZ | Who is calling me |
| QSY | Change frequency |
| AR | End of message |
| SK | End of contact |
| BT | Break, new paragraph |
The full set, and how prosigns differ from the NATO phonetic alphabet people often confuse them with, is in prosigns, Q-codes and the NATO alphabet.
Beacons: Morse you can hear without a licence
This is the use nobody notices, and the easiest one to verify yourself.
Aviation and marine navigation beacons identify themselves in Morse. The beacon transmits its navigation signal continuously, and a short identifier — usually two or three letters — repeats over the top of it. A pilot or navigator listens to confirm the receiver is locked to the beacon printed on the chart and not to some other station on a nearby frequency.
If a chart gives the identifier as BKR, the beacon sends this, over and over:
BKR -... -.- .-.Nobody has to read it fast. The identifier is three letters, it repeats endlessly, and you have as long as you like. It is a good reason for a pilot to know the alphabet, and for the code to still exist in an aviation manual in 2026.
Morse as a way to type
Morse needs exactly two distinct inputs. Nothing else usable gets that low.
That makes it valuable in accessibility, and Morse input exists as a switch-access method on mainstream phone platforms. Someone who cannot use a touchscreen keyboard but can operate two switches (or one switch, timed) can enter any letter, digit or punctuation mark in the standard. A code built for the telegraph turns out to be a well-designed input method for a problem it was never meant to solve, because both problems have the same shape: a channel that carries one bit at a time.
The largest group learning it is not on the radio
Search data makes this obvious. The Indonesian term for
Morse code, sandi morse, carries roughly 500,000 searches a month, on a par
with the English phrase "morse code" itself.
The reason is Pramuka, the Indonesian Scout Movement, which has around 25 million members and teaches Morse as part of its signalling curriculum. It is sent there with a whistle, with flags and with a torch, not with a transmitter. Scouting programmes elsewhere do the same on a smaller scale.
So if you counted the humans actively learning Morse this month, the largest share would be school-age children working towards a badge, not radio amateurs. That is a real, current use of the code, and almost every English-language page answering this question leaves it out.
What it is not used for
Be as strict about this as about the rest.
- "The military still relies on it." You will read this everywhere, almost always with no source. Do not repeat it, and be suspicious of any page that states it flatly.
- "Airlines use it to communicate." They do not. Beacon identifiers are the aviation use, and that is a one-way label, not a conversation.
- "Ships keep a Morse watch." They do not. GMDSS took that over.
- "It is what you fall back on when the grid goes down." Morse is a code, not a communication system. It needs a transmitter, a lamp or a hand, plus somebody at the other end who knows it. The code is the easy half.
The strongest honest claim for Morse in an emergency is narrower and better:
...---... is one of very few patterns a stranger might identify without a
chart, so it is worth having in your hands rather than in a notebook. SOS in
Morse code covers how to send it so it reads.
Is it worth learning now
That depends on which of the surviving uses appeals to you, and how patient you are about time.
You can memorise the chart in a day. Plenty of people do, and it feels like progress. You cannot learn to copy by ear in a day: that takes weeks of daily practice, in short sessions, and anyone promising a speed is selling something. The two skills are far enough apart that treating them as one is the main reason people quit.
The method that works is not a choice between two named systems, whatever the comparison posts say. Koch is about order and progression: start with two characters at full target speed, add another only once you copy at 90% accuracy, and never slow the characters down. Farnsworth is about spacing: full-speed characters with stretched gaps between them, so you hear the right rhythm and still have time to think. They change different variables, so they combine, and the combination is the standard recommendation. Koch vs Farnsworth goes through why the versus is the wrong framing.
I built MorseLab because the surviving uses all need the same few things and they were scattered across separate apps. It translates text to Morse and back, plays the result as a tone, a flashlight blink, a full-screen flash or a vibration, and has an SOS beacon that repeats on its own. It decodes a live beep through the microphone, reads printed text with the camera, and teaches the code with Koch-method lessons, drills, games, quizzes and streaks. The reference section carries the chart, the prosigns, the Q-codes above, the NATO alphabet and an interactive Morse tree. It works offline with no account, in 16 languages, which is the point when you are practising on a bus.
Common mistakes
- Answering with the maritime story and stopping. The distress role ended. That says nothing about the amateur bands, where the code is used more or less constantly.
- Confusing "not required" with "not used". Dropping the licence test removed an obligation, not the activity.
- Treating beacon identifiers as an afterthought. It is the one use almost anyone can verify with a receiver and a chart.
- Repeating military claims without a source. It is the least verifiable thing said about Morse and the most repeated.
- Calling SOS three letters.
...---...is one prosign, sent unbroken. As separate letters it is... --- ...and a different signal on the air. - Assuming it is a language. It is one substitution table plus timing. That is why it survives: there is very little of it to keep alive.
Questions people ask
Is Morse code still used today?
Yes, in narrower places than most pages suggest. Amateur radio CW is the living use, aviation and marine navigation beacons still identify themselves in Morse, Morse input exists as a switch-access method on mainstream phones, and scouting programmes teach it to millions of children.
Do ships still use Morse code for distress?
No. That role passed to GMDSS, an automated distress system. No coast station is
sitting with headphones on waiting for ...---....
Is Morse code still used by the military?
You will see this claimed constantly and sourced almost never. Treat it as unproven. The uses that can be checked are amateur radio, navigation beacon identifiers, accessibility input and teaching.
Do you need Morse code to get a ham radio licence?
Not in most countries any more. The requirement was dropped, which is why the people sending CW today are there by choice. Learning it opens a mode, not a door.
Is Morse code still used in aviation?
Yes, in one specific way. Navigation beacons repeat a short Morse identifier so a pilot can confirm which beacon the receiver is tuned to. It is not used for talking to anyone.
Why do people still learn Morse code?
For CW contacts at low power, for the accessibility input, for a scouting badge, because a light or a knock can carry it when nothing else works, and because it is a small complete system you can hold in your head.
Will Morse code ever disappear?
Nothing about it is fragile. It needs no infrastructure, no licence fee and no company, and it is defined by an international standard (ITU-R Recommendation M.1677-1, approved in 2009) that is still maintained. A code this cheap to keep does not vanish; it just gets used by fewer people for better reasons.
Get it: MorseLab — free on iPhone and Android. The link opens your own app store.
