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Yep, the hilarious part was looking at satellite dishes and hearing Morse in the background. Pretty good Morse though, obviously machine sent.

It was not Morse code. It was radioteletype tones. It was still pretty funny because that is old technology also, but not near as old as ditty boppin morse code. The Automated Teletype paper tape is read and sent from a Transmitter Distributor attached to the TTY and then received and printed by a Reperforator. It is actually Frequency Shift Keying of Baudot Code riding a Clear Wave signal. Our military used the TTY's in torn tape relay centers. Back in my day we had advanced to using 12 or 24 channel tone packs around the world. We still monitored UPI and AP feeds this old way on our Collins R390 radio with CV89 FSK Converter and just for kicks (and training) we would dial up the Indian Government propaganda signal that ran a teletype feed on HF radio 7x24x365.

Come to think of it, it could have been the Radio telemetry channel monitor on the satellite uplink. Are there any Satty Bird guys out there to confirm that? I only hand cranked a satellite track a couple of times by watching the signal strength meter just to help the satellite tech while he was troubleshooting the tracking problem and don't remember listening to the telemetry signal.

monitored UPI and AP feeds this old way on our Collins R390

I saw on HackADay where a guy modified his R390 to also transmit...a pretty cool hack :-)

http://hackaday.com/2013/06/06/hacking-the-r-390a-military-shortwave-radio-receiver-to-transmit-as-well/

I still use morse a lot in embedded systems I build. It's fast enough for data in many instances and dang it I just like using the nostalgic old workhorse. Plus, I can debug by just listening...it's cool :-) something like I2C is VERY hard to decode by ear .. lol

http://www.moviemistakes.com/main414

Enemy of the State trivia

Mistake During the brief occasional shots of the satellite you can hear Morse code. The code translates as CQ, which is amateur radio speak for ‘is anybody there?’ - hardly spy stuff.

I know the difference in Morse, Badot TTY and ASCII sent through an AFSK modulator. In the movie the background Morse was "CQ". My first TTY was a Model 19, later a model 32 Teletype. I even had a Kleinschmidt, but it never worked very well.

I ran a Navy MARS station out of my home for 19 years. Handled health & welfare traffic for the Navy and Marine Corps. Hold an Amateur Extra and GROL License

My first TTY demodulator was a homebrew tube type Twin Cities beast. Went from that to a Flesher TU-170 RTTY Terminal Unit, a very fine piece of equipment. Then I bought a Robot 800 keyboard, it operated Badot, ASCII and Morse. I still think the Flesher TU was superior in performance. I built a couple of totally homebrew Terminal Units, one was a PLL unit (performed poorly) and the other was a slicer type TU and was close to the Flesher in weak signal performance. I still have one of the AFSK boards that I brewed up. It is a beauty, I did the layout and etched the board, scrounged the parts and wired it. Very nice little unit.