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ag6aq BD4TDO Bravo5525 broad0105 cwtc Ditrat45 DS3MMH emura jgulick kazubou KD9WDR KL5SL Maly mapetite Moritz1 nv1k omgtillol Pelham seanw uz3awb W3ZWN

If I start at 27wpm letter speed and 7wpm effective speed, is it better to work each lesson up to 15wpm as I go, or do all the lessons at 7 and then do them all at, say, 9, and so on until I get to 15?

Thanks!
Steve

The purpose is to learn morse code before you lose intrest because it takes too long, and drop out. So go through the lessons at 20/5 and when you finish narrow the gap and work to 9/9. After that go to 10/10 and so on. Starting with lesson 9 use also words to exercise,

If you start repeating lessons you will be there for ever . . .

Try to get through to lesson 40 before you get bored and loose interest
then - if you haven't already
start using what you have, either on the bands or with friends.

Lots of people will slow down for you.

You will speed up.

20/20 is good enough for normal QSO, even if you don't get faster.

What speed do you think you should have ? 27/27

Why ?

Listen to lots of morse - mp3 or books in morse.

Gradually up the speed a bit if you want to learn faster code.

How fast are you aiming for, and why ?


YMMV

cb

I'm using the letter speed of 27 because I found I kept counting dots and dashes at slower speeds, no other reason. I still count them occasionally, but it's harder at 27.

I can do some of the early lessons at 12 or even 15 wpm effective, but it drops off rapidly to 6-7 after lesson 3. At 6wpm effective I can move through the lessons pretty quickly but don't want to set myself up for hard times later if going that slow will do so.

I would like to be at 15-20wpm. I don't need to be very fast, just fast enough for most of what I'll run into.

A lot of this depends upon your aptitude.

Some people make 25/25 in a few weeks, others take years if at all . .

Here you are learning using a combined Koch/Farnsworth method which I think is good if you have lower aptitude.

We can't tell how high your aptitude is. You might not know yourself.


G4FON advocates Koch on its own . . . Learn at the speed you are aiming to use.

Here he is :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBmuoLUV1LM

Farnsworth timings allow you to have more time to decode - if you can't keep up - but you then can't decode full speed morse untl you get used to it.

You are probably aiming to decode and comprehend in your head.

This means you need to set up an automatic reaction - hear morse -> the letter pops into your mind automatically.

For this you need to hear the morse characters as a single unit not separate dits and dahs
which
should be the case at 27/

This is probably the most important issue, but YMMV.


After you have been through your 40 lessons at say 27/6 you need to decide what to do next.

Some advise a process of "drop the char speed and close the gap" and do the lessons again, until you reach parity at say 15/15

But 27/ and 15/ are quite different.


Did you try the lessons at 20/20 or go straight to Farnsworth timing ?


My view is start using the code ASAP. Find some practice partners.

You have to decide though - only you know how you are doing.

cb

To add a little to cb's wisdom, if I may.

Some ask if G4FON(SK unfortunately) advocated Koch, why did he offer Farsnworth in his trainer?

Well for one you see with version 10+ the minimum
character speed is 2owpm, that goes to learning at a reasonable on air skill (still not saying its easy), and it was to help prevent the counting of dits/dahs.

G4FON realized that we all learn differently, and he didn't want to abandon those that just needed the extra help of some Farnsworth capabilities.

You will notice that unlike LCWO and most other trainers, he does NOT give you complete freedom of "effective" of Farsnworth speeds. He makes you pick discrete steps up to the match of your character speed - a way to get you to progress to a normal speed as soon as possible.

Also in his general settings, he lets you set whether the Farnsworth is on a character or word basis, this is very helpful in getting the word at speed like 20/20 but only stretching the inter word speed to be slower (LCWO lets you do this by using the "extra space" in the third box of the cw setting page.

Another use of Farnsworth which G4FON talks about in his famous RSGB video is for ICR (instant character recognition) training. He advocated setting a speed like 20/12 and listening to the random characters and verbally speaking the character as its heard - this confirms to your conscious that you really got the character vs just hearing it and nodding to your self that you just recognized it. This can be a challenging and eye opening exercise when the slower speed is more than about 15 i.e. 20/15 20/16 etc. Of course you can try this in LCWO as well.

Thinks worth learning, often take serious effort.
Good Luck.

73 wa2nfn

I started out at 20/15, and found the letters all ran together and I was identifying them by the pattern of dits & dahs rather than the sound when I could keep up, which was rare. So I upped the speed to 27wpm character speed but found I still could not keep up at 15 effective. Seeing some posts here that recommended dropping the effective speed to get through the lessons to avoid dropping out, I chose to do that. And it’s worked as far as less 21 or so, but with a few downsides. One is that I cannot hear the letters at 15-20wpm-ish or less - they don’t have a sound anymore, so I don’t recognize them. So I can hear the characters fast but not recognize them for fast copy, and can’t hear the characters slow enough that I can copy. Not so good for getting on the air! When I listen to code on the air the characters run together - it’s like there is no space between them.

So I’ve gone down to 20/15, and really struggled to keep up after the first few groups, but 20/12 seems more manageable so I’m going to stick with that for a while.

Incidentally, I did the ‘Morse Mania’ app on iOS (the Teal and Orange one, not the former Mac app) and learned all the characters & symbols in that at 27wpm. It’s a lot like Morse Machine here, but better on the phone.

I started all this on 8/16/21, if that gives any sense of aptitude.

If you already know all the chars at 27/, ( I guess you didn't start "morse mania" on 20210816 ) then you could try a modified farnsworth where you have 27/27 morse groups but a farnsworth (longer) space between the groups.

You then have to remember the morse which may get you started with "head" decoding.


If you already know all the chars then you are on to the stage of repeat decoding to the point where it is happening automatically without you having to think to decode.

For my money (YMMV) I would be listening to lots of morse . . .

YMMV as ever

cb