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Hi, I am wondering what is a good speed to start learning CW. Starting at 12 wpm right away or start a bit slower and slowly turning the speed up?

In the CW settings you can start with 20 wpm but wide spaced characters. Advantage is that 20 is an excellent final goal for the CW bands, and you learn the characters by sound, not by counting dots. That is very important.

The spacing speed, called effective speed is then best adjusted between 8 and 10 wpm.

Finish the course in 40 lessons. Each exercise 5 minutes. Average will be about 25 exercises for each lesson.
So make a schedule, and exercise every day 15 minutes total. When you are in the mood or not, just do it.

Ok, tnx for your help. I'll set the speed to 20 wpm

I also started at 20wpm and 6wpm effictive.
When in the mood I also try a lesson set to 30/4wpm, leaving absolutely no room for counting dits and dahs.

But I do keep the excersice time only at 1 - 2 minutes max. If I go longer concentration and correct rates go down quickly.

I also alternate between the lections and the morse machine.
The morse machine often is much less frustrating.

And I do only learn 10 minutes in a row the go and do something else and go back at it after a while.


Good luck and persistence to all of us

73s and a happy new year 2011

Benny and others, thanks for the guidance. Like Woeka, I am working through the lessons and wondered when to advance to the next section. I don't just go on the 90% mark the first time I can achieve it. I do find that my ability to keep hitting 90% multiple times in a row is very low.

I do find the Morse Machine easier to do using the keyboard but then I find that writing down letters from on-the-air QSOs does not work too well. I lose characters when I have to rethink of how to write the letter rather than just typing it.

Also, I've sped up the speed to almost 20wpm and can understand that it sounds different than when it was set to 5wpm. Makes a big difference.

Thanks again to all!

Cheers and 73s,

David/KG6IRW

73 is singularis. It means greetingS hence 73s means greetingSS.

Go on till you ONCE touch over 90%, then proceed to next lesson. NOT earlier. NOT later. DO NOT go back to a previous lesson.

RIGHT: writing morse is just as copy in your head and touch typing, or reading light signals, or feeling morse code, or reading dots and dashes from a paper tape a different process. You fall severely back in speed when you don't exercise them all and try one without previous exercising.

What you need as a ham is copy by head and writing. NOT typing. (unless you contest on a PC and type call and report)

So best thing you can do is write your exercises on paper. Only one out of 10 exercises :copy the paper written output to your PC keyboard in order to evaluate your results of that exercise.

Be sure that you are not wasting your time by doing the course partially and then stop. Stop right now or proceed till the end. Otherwise this website will continue showing the lack of character and will power of 95% of its users.

Don't use morse machine, it is as bad as counting dits and dahs. That is becuase you hear a character, you are reacting by typing and AFTER typing you get the next one. That is very bad, because your speed is then always limited by your long reaction time sound->finger, from the very beginning you have to build a pipeline in your head that collect the next character in the time that you are reacting on the previous one.

Only parallel processing in your head can yield the ability to copy usable speeds, and Morse Machine is frustrating that building of parallel processing.

The "word training" would be fun if it kept the same character speed, and only adjusted the spacing. I like how it slows down if you miss a word. Thanks.

You can set a minimum character speed. If you set this to the maximum speed you expect, the effect is just that: At this speed, you'll have normal spacing, any any speed below you'll have extra spacing ("Farnsworth").

73
Fabian

N4MGB means "Plain text Training" I suppose.

Yes, I set the "minimum character speed" to the same as the overall speed. Now, if I miss a word it slows down between characters, but the sound of the characters is the same.
This is most fun I have ever had with Morse. Thanks.

I started at 20wpm 10 effective, i there a good advice on when to advance the effective speed to a higher setting? Suppose you want to end the 40 lessons at 20wpm and 20 effective.

Increase the effective speed at any time you feel comfortable doing it. It cannot hurt to play around around a little with the settings. Try to do 20/20 and see if you can keep up with typing/writing, i.e. find out what the limiting factor is: The code recognition or the writing.

Even with a slow progression in effective speed of only 1 WpM after 5 lessons, you're almost at 20/20 at the end...

Good luck!

73
Fabian DJ1YFK