|Anyone worked on any morse decoding algorithms wants to share
|ideas then fine - pls let me know - probably best to my reader
|direct and if there is  interest I'll summarize here later

One story I read somewhere, but I'd like to find a real and definitive
source for it, was that the original purpose of the telegraph was in
fact to produce marks on paper (the paper being moved at a constant
speed while the solenoid controlled a pen).  Tapping the pen against the
paper briefly would produce a dot while holding it would produce a dash.
The idea, then, was that the recipient of a message, following its receipt,
would then proceed to decode the dots and dashes on the paper into letters,
numbers, and other symbols.

The idea of a telegraph simply operating a noisemaker (and having the message
recipient listen for the message as it was being sent) came later, after some
people (including, interestingly enough, Andrew Carnegie) discovered that they
didn't have to look at the paper to know what message had just been sent.

Returning to the real of PICs, there may be some advantages to storing the act-
ual sequence of dots and dashes, rather than trying to grab the information "on
the fly"; while the dot/dash ratio is supposed to be about 3:1, leaving some
substantial room for error, I would expect that there are probably some ham-hand
ed
operators whose coding is not very consistent.  If you have the ability to compa
re
the length of marks and spaces to those that come after as well as those that ca
me
before, you may be better able to divide the marks into the two proper categorie
s
and the spaces into three.