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ac8yh AJ5TX ALEKSEI AndrzejRudy barutan bd8cbp CaptCadwallader chuckchen CR2022mix damianmatyjasik davamdean DO3BIG elk841 htsnk ja5ivg kameakio kohei lucassena mapleice n1rip Nobunaga R3XCZ sakiman1960 test tkonno

Hi!

Is there an advantage to trying to learn in a slow pace with really fast code 20/20 or learning fast albeit in slower code like 20/5 ?

When you are a person that tends to quit when there are no instant results, you better start with 20/5,

When finished 40 lessons go to 15/10 and repeat the course, when done do some 12/12 exercising and start to use 12/12 on the band(s).

I'll think about it. it seems like I am improving with my lesson 5 20/20. * crossingfingers*

Object of the exercise is, presumably, to be able to use Morse on air? For that you need to learn all the characters just fast enough to understand what you're hearing. Catch with Koch (assuming it's working for you - it doesn't work for everybody) is it can set a perfectionist bar. Pick too high a speed and your progress can get very slow. Better to work at a slower speed and get all the characters in two months than to insist on something too fast and not get there even in two years...

...and on-air use is most likely a better way of getting better.

@lzlep . I wonder if how many people actually use Koch from zero. I mean with no cw experrience and how long it took them to do a 20/20 .

@lzlep . I wonder if how many people actually use Koch from zero. I mean with no cw experrience and how long it took them to do a 20/20 .

One thing for sure: 95% of the people quit before they complete the course. So they wasted the invested time.
When you have sufficient talent, and I estimate you have, you can in your case master in 6 month 20/20

As long as you did not reach your personal speed ceiling, it is very helpful to copy 5 wpm faster then you are able to do. When you go back it seems slow and there is a lot of improvement.

When that happens not anymore you reached your ceiling which is very hard to break over a long time. I am talking about copying plain text in your head.

I can't answer that. However, I now know that 20 wpm was too fast a target for me; I can not type or write the random characters Koch programs produce that fast. If I'd set the bar at 15 wpm right at the start I might have made better progress with the Koch course. As it is, I abandoned Koch and learned the characters the old-fashioned way.

@lzlep .. hmm. I thought Koch is the best way to learn. What is the "old fashioned way" to learn that you are talking about?

Koch is a popular way to learn Morse, and it clearly works for many. After more than two years of not getting anywhere useful despite spending lots of time on it, I finally realised it was not going to work for me. I should have realised that within three or four months.

My "old fashioned way" was an extension of the way I was taught the alphabet in nursery school. I used the "Convert text to CW" option on this site to make a long CD to listen to; didah, dahdididit, dahdidahdit at (I think) 16wpm or so, with all the characters in one go. Single characters in logical progression, and pairs of characters in logical progression, listened to (and saying the character names, A,B,C, AA,AB,AC, AA,BA,CA) over and over (without writing or typing) until I figured I knew them. It's probably a terrible way to learn, but it worked better than Koch for me.

After that I moved on to code practice broadcasts, and listening on air, and trying simple QSOs. Time spent on the callsign exerciser and so on helps, especially when the bands are dead. I doubt I'll ever be a QRQ operator, nor enjoy much rag-chew on CW, but I don't rag-chew much on phone modes either, and being on air is way more encouraging than any Koch scores, even if the QSOs are just rubber-stamp exchanges of callsigns, references and signal reports...

@lzlep interesting . I myself find it boring sometimes thats why I try different things also. Do you notice that trying to practice on different speeds is like learning CW all over again? It kind of screws up the timing and recognition suffers too.

On air you'll have to deal with such variations, so it's probably worth getting used to them from the start. Vary the pitch (though I find the random pitch is a bit too random) and the speed, especially stretching yourself in the faster direction. When you come back to the speed you started at it will seem slow, or at least slower...

does anyone have opinion on the morsemachine on this site? I have been using this for a week now and have about half of the characters down. I bought a key and now listen to the machine then send what I hear and move on. I think this is a good little tool.

W5RJH

Sure there is, a wealth of information in this forum collected over the years.

Try at google: morsemachine site: lcwo.net

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