Learning Morse code has been a good struggle for me this past year. I’ve averaged somewhere between half an hour and an hour per day of drill for the whole year, and taken only a few days off here and there.

I tried and failed to learn Morse as a child, so wanting to learn it at all surprised me. I think that I have a lot more trouble learning Morse than most people, and it’s still fun. If today’s resources for learning Morse code had been available to me as a child, it would have been a lot easier.

I had a lot of questions when I started, and had to go hunting for information. This is my history of learning Morse code and the things that I’ve learned, many of which I wish that I’d learned earlier.

Preparing to Learn

Whatever tool you use, don’t learn visually. Learn to listen. Learn Morse like a spoken language. Use tools and/or classes that use “Farnsworth” timing, where the individual characters are sent fast, with lots of extra space between the characters in which to practice conscious recollection as you slowly build unconscious recognition.

Most successful learners use variations on the Koch method (invented by Ludwig Koch), starting with two characters at full speed, adding one new character as characters as you build conscious recollection. (Koch originally used no extra spacing; most successful learning programs use the Koch method with some Farnsworth spacing.)

Ignore everyone who confidently tells you that there is exactly one character speed to use so that you don’t count elements (dits and dahs) as you learn (I’ve seen figures from 13WPM to 20WPM to 30WPM touted as universal speeds at which this is true). Find out what works for you. Set it to whatever speed it takes that you personally do not in practice count dits. (If you aren’t having trouble initially distinguishing H and 5, consider setting the character speed faster.)

I did a lot of music as a kid, “counting out” very fast rhythms, and I therefore had to set the character speed to 35–45WPM to finally shut down my subliminal counting machine, while setting the Farnsworth spacing in the 5–8WPM range to give room for slow recall. After months of drill, I was finally able to reduce the character speed, and I’m finally down to being able to drill at 20WPM character speed with no Farnsworth spacing.

Find Learning Resources

Where to start depends on whether you prefer (or have schedule for) guided learning or self-directed learning, and whether you benefit from social pressure to stay on task. I am primarily an auto-didact and prefer self-guided learning.

Classes

I did not use classes because of my schedule and learning preferences, but here are two I know others have used.

Writing

I found Zen and the Art of Radiotelegraphy by Carlo Consoli, IK0YGJ, well after I started learning Morse. Also, I didn’t have space in my life to follow its recommendations for how to learn even if I’d seen it earlier, but still found it useful perspective. Worth a read.

Online Tools

I started with DJ5CW’s LCWO. I drilled characters in the “Lessons” for several months before doing anything else. I now regret that I waited months to start using its “Morse Machine” for drill. It would have been better to go quickly through the lessons until I could at least sometimes, with thought, recognize each character, and then use the Morse Machine to cement that learning.

After a while, I wanted to go portable and practice on my phone, where I found phone apps a bit better integrated than web apps. I used Morse Code for Android as a portable Morse Machine for a few months.

I have continued to use IZ2UUF Morse Koch CW to drill head copy for call signs, random words, phrases, a list of names I added to it, and common QSO phrases. I set it running when I get in my car, and follow along as traffic and conditions permit. (The downside is that ignoring it when traffic requires high attention is that I inadvertently practice dropping my attention from the Morse. For me, on balance, it’s been the key to me actually averaging well more than half an hour a day of real drill. My work commute is nearly 30 minutes each way, and I can usually get in 30 minutes on any shopping trip as well.)

I use Morse Walker to practice for POTA, SST, and Field Day, and I keep hoping that the original author accepts my PR adding Field Day suport. When I started, I set a max calling station limit of just one station to avoid pileups, but now I’ll set it as high as three. (I don’t see that there’s much value in going to more than three in Morse Walker.) My branch also adds display of how many stations were in the pileup next to how many attempts it took, just to make me feel less bad about not getting things the first time.

I sometimes play Morsle for fun, where I’ve set the practice mode to start at 45WPM (though I rarely succeed hearing a word at 45WPM first try!)

I’ve recently learned about Morose for instant character recognition training, and keep meaning to use it more when I’m at the computer, but tend to gravitate to Morse Walker.

I occasionally watch K4SWL’s POTA activation videos and try to copy his callers.

Listen On the Air

You can listen to the ARRL’s W1AW code practice sessions on the air or on the web.

Progress

Drill will almost certainly feel frustrating at times. If you find yourself frustrated, then for at least part of your consistent drill, use a tool that gives you numeric measures. I felt like I was getting nowhere for many weeks, except that my Morse Machine character drill speeds crept up week to week (though they wandered up and down day to day). That helped me keep going.

I felt really dense doing the Koch lessons of blocks of five random characters. I would remember a character for one block, and forget the same character 15 seconds later. Also, I would swap characters that invert the dits and dahs, e.g. L (• ━ • •) for Y (━ • ━ ━), K (━ • ━) for R (• ━ •), P (• ━ ━ •) for X (━ • • ━), A (• ━) for N (━ •), and so forth. I would freeze up for ten to fifteen seconds at a time, and for a bit, code was just noise flowing in one ear and out the other. It took a lot of practice to get better.

I am glad I waited to practice sending until I had drilled for months. But once I did, starting with a paddle (see below), where my thumb sends dit and my fingers send dah, really helped reduce inversion errors. I think it helped me associate sound and physical movement. I don’t think starting that sooner would have been good. First learn to listen, then use sending with a paddle to help you over a hump later. Many folks I’ve talked to have described similar troubles with confusing inverted pairs like that. If you experience this too, don’t worry about it, you’ll get there.

After several months, I started to slowly reduce the Farnsworth spacing while drilling until I had removed all of it, but that took many more months.

Copying arbitrary text is a different skill from recognizing individual letters, and you should expect to practice it separately after becoming good at recognizing letters. Trying to pay attention to a spoken conversation in which t h e - p a r t i c i p a n t s - s p e l l e d - o u t - e v e r y - w o r d - w o u l d - a l s o - b e - h a r d - s o - g i v e - y o u r s e l f - a - b r e a k - w h e n - i t - i s - h a r d - t o - f o l l o w - m o r s e - c o d e. Holding letters in your mind while assembling a word is itself a new skill. This is true whether it is a call sign or a natural language word.

Sending

The Morserino M32 Pocket is the latest version of the open source Morserino available for purchase.

There are at least web three sites for practicing CW online:

  • VBand market their own adapter for keys, and explicitly say that all other adapters are unsupported. However, the Morserino is able to work as a VBand adapter.
  • Vail has at least one open source adapter design for connecting a morse code key to USB ports, and because Vail supports VBand adapters as one of several options, Morserino will also work with Vail.
  • Morse Me Please does not allow connecting adapters. This makes it more useful for use from a mobile, but of more limited value for real practice.

While practicing sending, do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth always adds some delay as it encodes and decodes, by design. You need practically instantaneous feedback from touch to sound. Use wired headsets or earbuds, or wired speakers, to hear while you pratice sending.

Get On The Air

Start with programs where you can respond to a caller. Start by responding to someone else who is calling CQ.

  • You don’t have to start by learning to pull call signs out of a “pile-up” where multiple people are sending at the same time.

  • You can work out the details of the exchange ahead of time as the more experienced operator works other calling stations, so that when they take your call you are just confirming your expectations, and have fewer surprises.

Expect to get confused. It’s OK. No one will hold it against you. If you just give up and stop sending, the other operator will give up and move on at some point. It turns out that “QSB” (fading signals) is a normal occurence much of the time, and dealing with a disappearing station is part of our normal experience on the air. If you disappear a few times because you are out of your depth at first, it’s OK. No sweat. No one is keeping a list of stations that have “ghosted” them to never talk to again, and if they are, you don’t want to talk to them anyway!

POTA

Parks on the Air (POTA) is a great way to get started. The normal vocabulary is small. Plenty of operators will slow down to match your speed. Call at the speed you would like to hear. Most commonly, they will add Farnsworth spacing rather than slowing down their character rate.

You can use the POTA site (or the Ham2k Polo logging app that integrates with it) to see who is “spotted,” with their frequency, call sign, and state. That makes at least part of the listening process to be confirming what you see, making it easier to get started.

You’ll want to at least recognize your own call sign, numbers, and state/province abbreviations. Also BK (back to you/me), ? (used alone to ask for a repeat, or after a call sign to ask whether it was copied correctly), R (roger, used to confirm after a question like whether they copied your call sign right), STATE?, CALL? (call sign?), AGN? (again), RST, TU (thank you), GM (good morning), GA (good afternoon), GE (good evening), UR (your), and know that “9” is often sent as “N” (the most common “cut number”). The “BK” is sent both at the end of a short “over” meaning “back to you” and at the beginnine of the next over meaning “back to me”. It is not technically a “prosign” and thus should be sent as separate characters, not run together, but you can expect lots of operators to send it run together anyway. This is amateur radio (emphasis on amateur), and the “ham” moniker originally referred to being bad at sending Morse code. It’s OK.

You can listen to a few other callers until you are sure you have copied the state correctly before you try to call. Most of the time, you just need to be able to send your call sign, and then after they copy your call sign, something like “BK GA UR 5NN 5NN ST ST BK”. Don’t worry at first about the signal report. As you get more comfortable, you can start sending better signal reports. The rules encourage real signal reports, but there are plenty of operators who just send 599 (typically as “5NN”).

If they respond with the full “over” with what sounds like your call sign but you are not sure, or if they definitely responded to you, but got your call slightly wrong, you can respond with a hint, “BK GA UR 5NN 5NN ST ST DE YOURCALL BK” — you’ll usually hear them respond with something like “BK R R YOURCALL TU ST ES 73 DE THEIRCALL” to confirm they got it.

Here’s the best video I’ve found for how to operate CW while doing POTA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODYyAxe3gMo

SST

Twice each week for an hour, the K1USN SST (Slow Speed conTest) is an opportunity for a short “exchange” at a relaxed pace; you should expect the other operator to respond at roughly your speed, and never go above 20WPM. Use pskreporter to find where K1USN is currently operating and listen in.

The conversation will follow a script that is described on the SST site.

Since states or provinces are provided by standard two-letter abbreviation, that’s easy to learn, and is a skill shared with POTA.

The main new challenge when you add SST is to learn to copy the other operator’s name. When you are first getting started, listen to multiple other QSOs until you copy their name and state. Practice sending their name without transmitting. Once you are ready, try calling to them in response to “CQ SST THEIRCALL”. Just send your call sign once, and wait for them to respond “YOURCALL THEIRNAME THEIRSTATE”. You respond “GE THEIRNAME YOURNAME YOURSTATE” and expect their response to be something like “GL YOURNAME TU THEIRCALL SST”. (“GL” is short for “Good Luck!”)

You can respond either after “CQ SST THEIRCALL” or directly after another operator’s QSP as soon as you hear “GL OTHERNAME TU THEIRCALL SST” — the “SST” at the end is an invitation for the next station to call.

Keys and Keyers

A “key” is the physical device that you use to form characters, and a “keyer” is an electronic device that forms the sounds of the characters using input from a key.

Keys

There are four or five basic kind of keys:

  • Straight key (the original). When using a straight key, the radio sends a continuous tone while you are pressing it, and not otherwise, so that you are completely responsible for the length of the dit, the length of the dah, and the lengths of all the spaces.

  • Sideswiper (also known as a “cootie”), which acts like a straight key, but you move it from side to side instead of up and down. There is a contact on each side, but they are electrically the same. It can reduce RSI (“glass arm”), but like the straight key, you are responsible for the length of dit and dah because it’s just two contacts instead of one.

  • Bug (vibroplex) where it makes dits mechanically when you press with your thumb, but you still are responsible for the length of dah by pressing with your fingers. (You could use it just like a straight key by pressing only with your fingers.)

  • “Paddles” require an electronic keyer to form the dit and dah; most modern radios have this built in, and you can also buy or build separate keyers that connect to a radio. They keyer is set to generate dits and dahs at a specific speed.

Paddles come in two variants:

  • Single paddle, where your thumb gives you a stream of dits as you push with it, and your fingers give a stream of dahs as you push the other way with them, but the paddle can’t move in both directions at the same time.

  • Double paddle, which is like the single paddle, except that (in the most common modes) if you squeeze the two paddles together, you get a stream of alternating dits and dahs. This is called iambic, or “squeeze,” keying. An alternating “dit-dah-dit-dah” pattern feels like the iambic “foot” in scansion (poetic rhythm), thus the name.

Lots of hams love iambic, double-paddle keys. Most Morse code contest winners use single-paddle keys because they are more accurate than double-paddle keys, and the contests penalize mistakes.

Some paddles include a switch so that you can switch which side is dit and which side is dah, either for left-handed sending or because you just want to send the other way.

Regardless of key selection, some hams learn to send with their non-dominant hand so that they can write in their log with their dominant hand while sending with their non-dominant hand.

Keyers

Keyers were originally analog electronics, but are now mostly digital. There are three common modes (A, B, and Ultimatic), and now with digital keyers it is also possible to have a “bug emulator” that makes paddles act more or less like a bug. The difference between A and B is not relevant to single-paddle keys, only double-paddle. The choice between modes is a matter of personal preference. Ultimatic is the original dual-paddle keyer, which when squeezed, repeats the element associated with last paddle contact made, rather than alternating between elements.

Getting Started

When you do get a key, I advise against starting with a “straight key” or “sideswiper” where you are responsible for timing the dit and dah. There are plenty of really bad “fists” on the air with horrible timing that makes them hard to copy.

A keyer will help you learn how the characters should sound by forming good dits and dahs.

Learn what good timing sounds like, including when you are sending, then do straight key, sideswiper, or even bugs later when you know what good code sound like. Experienced operators hear those syncopated keys as an accent, but it’s harder for new operators.

Why “Morse?”

“Morse” might better be called “Vail” or “Gerke” code. The original telegraph code, which used three element lengths (dot, short dash, and long dash), was designed by Samuel Morse’s collaborator Alfred Vail. Samuel Morse’s idea was to just send numbers and look them up in a code book; Vail suggested and implemented sending unique codes for each letter. The modern ITU-R International Morse Code we use today is a refinement of the “Hamburg” variation created by Friedrich Gerke around 1848 for the German railway, which changed from three symbols to two. The International Telegraphy Congress standardized what is now International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Morse code in 1865. The most recent addition to the standard is the @ symbol (• ━ ━ • ━ •) which was added 24 May 2004, on the 160th anniversary of the first public Morse telegraph transmission.

Farnsworth timing

The additional character spacing named for W6TTB Russ Farnsworth is apparently misattributed, but the chances that it will be widely renamed “Edison timing” seem slim.