Actually, looking back on it, we should credit Prospero as the first person with a partly accurate translation seeing that plus the "SOS + rEDGrN" hint got me back on morse code. Then moinen had the first fully accurate translation. I wish I could tag messages in here or something, it's hard to sort the good ideas that were ultimately fruitless from the actual progress.

I also started bottom to top, but when that didn't work, I tried top to bottom. I'm using python manipulate the csv and I built a dict to handle the morse code translation so it was fairly trivial for me to check against the complete data set in various directions.