[youtube]I have been hearing morse code in my left ear every night and morning for more than a year. At one time I studied morse with the goal of getting a HAM license but didn't follow through. I can recognize individual letters but I'm not good enough to keep up with the level of skill that the senders seem to demonstrate. It is now 9:10 am PDT and I have code going on as I type this. Later when the sun gets higher the code will go away. Right now the CW (continuous wave) tone is fairly low and the code is more of a beginner's level. Some times the code is higher pitched and very professional like that produced by military radio operators using a "bug," which is a semi-automated key that allows sending speeds of up to 100 words per minute. Military code readers use an electric typewriter to receive at that speed. When I was a kid in the 50s we would make "crystal" radios that had nothing more than a gallium-arsenide crystal, a resistor and a capacitor. You tuned in different stations by touching various hills and vallies on the crystal with a "cat's whisker," a springy wire that was part of the circuit. There were no batteries and you needed headphones connected to the circuit to hear the radio broadcasts. The radio waves coming off of the antenna were the sole power that was necessary to power the headphones. The weird thing in my present situation is that there was no change to the metal in my crowns and bridges a year ago so something else must be involved. What I'm hearing right now seems to be a conversation between a beginning coder and someone else who is much faster. I'm going back to the ARRL website to bone up on my code-reading ability to try to identify some of the senders. < [link to www.arrl.org]