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7l2dgn Bohr daysailor ik2uuv Jbenton Jcaig K4CTC K6JZ Katipo OH6EWU ON7PK pe1rdp rlniii ryuchan sq3kan test ub4cau WS9Q

Using LCWO, I've learned the 40 characters at 20WPM character speed and 15WPM effective speed. I am now working to the eliminate all the Farnsworth spacing. I'm currently testing with an Effective speed of 19WPM. I wanted to share some observations I've made about my testing that others might find helpful.

When I look back at my test results, the first thing I notice are the characters I got wrong. I am still having trouble with the many dit characters (5, H, S) or (4, V) or (6, B). But I also noticed some other trends that have helped me adjust my training.

When I see a bunch of mistakes on a single 5 character group; that means I am not letting go of my mistakes quick enough. I need to stay in the flow and focus on what is currently being sent and forget about what I just missed. This has been hard for me, but by focusing on improving my mistake recovery speed; I have seen great improvement in my overall results. What I want to see is just 1 or maybe just 2 mistakes on a given line of 5 characters. If that is the case, I will keep on training and take another test.

When I see that all my mistakes are within the last 2 characters of the 5 character sets; that tells me I need to take a break. I am getting tired and losing concentration within the 5 character set. I'm not getting "caught-up" until the "word" break in between 5 character sets.

When I see that my mistakes are bunched up at the end of a 2 minute test (I use 2 minutes); that also tells me that I'm getting tired and need to take a break.

If I feel fresh, but my results are just not there, I will spend time in MorseMachine and just try to improve my instant character recognition and try to get to an Effective Speed of 9WPM. 9WPM might not sound fast, but the system takes into account the time it takes you to type the letter in its calculation of actual Effective Speed. If I make a mistake and hear the buzzer, I always wait the full "penalty" seconds to hear the character again, before typing the correct character. This helps my subconscious brain properly associate the character sound with the correct key on the keyboard. I don't want the sound to be associated with my early mistake.

Good luck in your CW journey, especially your instant character recognition efforts.

Thanks for your observations. Sounds similar to my experiences. I daily train with
- 5 character group (12 times)
- plain text (3-5 times)
- word training (once)

It's interesting for me to see how different my results are from day to day, and also time of the day. I also focus in not to think about the errors of the last characters, meaing "don not think, jsut hear and type. As soon as I wondering whether the last character was e.g. an 'h' or a '5' I am lost ;-)
At the end of the "5 character group" training I becoming tired and the error rate increases. Not sure, whether I should stop at that point or should proceed and challenge myself even if the error rate increases.
Still a long journey for me, but hopefully I will survive ;-)

This site is great but don't expect to become fluent using using this one only. It's a bit like Duolingo. It can give you a kickstart but real morse on air is different.

Real Morse is only different when you start after finishing lesson 40 with 20/10 using that on the bands, and requesting for QRS. It turns out you even can't copy machine generated keyboard code 12/12.

You better learn after lesson 40 correctly spaced Morse code first. That is fastest with the same throughput (characters per minute) by adapting from 20/10 to 13/13 and from 20/5 to 9/9.