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Learning Morse Code

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

First of all, I would like to say that this is not meant to be a ‘definitive guide’ to learning morse code! There are many ways to do it, the best way being the one that works for you. This page presents some of the conventional wisdom plus a few ideas on how you might use the morse code generator found at this web site (or morse software running on your own computer). Above all, Regular Practice seems to be the key to drilling the sounds into your head so they become second nature. I’ve reproduced a useful article by David Finley on learning code using the Koch method.

Technician

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

The FCC Technician Exam (Element 2) consists of 35 questions, you are required to get over 75% (26 out of 35) for a passing grade. There are 10 subelements, T0-T9, and the full exam consists of questions from each subelement (and from each of the topic groups within each subelement). You can use the checkboxes below to include some or all of the subelements in your practice exam.

Current Question Pool: 424 Questions, Effective July 1, 2022 - June 30th 2026

General

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

The FCC General Exam (Element 3) consists of 35 questions, you are required to get over 75% (26 out of 35) for a passing grade. There are ten subelements, G0-G9, and the full exam consists of questions from each subelement (and from each of the topic groups within each subelement). You can use the checkboxes below to include some or all of the subelements in your practice exam.

Current Question Pool: 429 Questions, Effective July 1, 2023 - June 30, 2027

Morse Code Generator

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

You can use this page to create customized morse code, everything from basic letters and numbers to fully-fledged morse code conversations. If you find this morse generator helpful, please consider supporting this site.

Instructions

Adjust the morse code parameters as needed, the group size impacts how many groups of text get created for many of the morse content types. 1 group is typically the eqivalent of 5 words with 5 characters per word.
Select the type of morse code you want to generate by clicking on type of content desired - Koch, Letters, Callsigns, etc.. The button will turn solid orange when that option is selected.
Click the “Generate new practice text” button to create the text you want to practice
Click ‘Play’ to listen to the morse code. You can click Show Text to see the original text being sent.

Select the morse code content

Group Size

Overall Speed

Use Farnsworth?

Character Speed

Koch

Start with K & M then add R when you can copy K and M correctly 90% of the time, as you learn each new character (copy >90%) add the character below it on the list until you know them all!

Letters

Another approach to learning the letters is by learning the various letter groups (similar sounds) and then adding in more groups over time.

Numbers

This contains all the numbers, 0-9

Punctuation and Prosigns

Generates five sets of five punctuation and prosigns per group.

All Characters

This contains all the letters, numbers, punctuation and prosigns, five sets of five characters per group.

Callsigns

This generates random callsigns containing letters, numbers, and certain punctuation symbols, five callsigns per group.

Field Day Exchange

This generates random callsigns containing letters, numbers, and certain punctuation symbols plus the ARRL Field Day exchange (class and section). Increasing the Group Size adds additional sets of five station exchanges.

POTA CW QSO

This generates a typical POTA-style exchange with random callsigns containing letters, numbers, and certain punctuation symbols. Increasing the Group Size adds in additional station exchanges.

QSO

This creates part of a simulated morse contact with another amateur station, it will contains callsigns, abbreviations, prosigns and more. The Group Size has no effect on the QSO option.

If you find the morse code generator helpful please consider supporting the site!

POTA CW exchanges added to Morse Generator

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 12:33:46 +1000

POTA CW exchanges added - I have added POTA (Parks on the Air) exchanges to the Morse Code Generator. I have used various sources for how these types of exchanges normally go (see list below), but they may need ’tweaking’ a bit to add in more variability.

Here’s an example of what it might generate so far. It assumes there’s an activating station that calls CQ at the start and then there are some replies from hunters, up to five, depending on the Group setting you use on the generator page (e.g., setting Group = 3 would give you replies from three hunter stations).

Upcoming maintenance & new Extra pool

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:33:46 +1000

I’m doing some behind the scenes maintainance work on the site, consolidating my DNS and Nameservers and other things. Hopefully this wont result in any issues but you never know! If the site does vanish or stop working then please let me know.

I’m also working on the new Extra pool that was released recently. I’m a little behind on getting that into the site due to some other maintenance that needed to be done before I could update the question pool.

Welcome to the new site!

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 12:33:46 +1000

Its a brand new look for AA9PW.com! After many years of WordPress combined with various hacks and other disruptions I figured it was time to change things up and move to something a bit more modern. This new site is built using Hugo, a Static Site Generator (SSG) that uses the Go programming language under the hood.

This is still a work in progress and I imagine I’m going to be tweaking things for a while. The main benefit is that I can move away from having WordPress, a backend database and the required hosting infrastructure, to something a bit more streamlined. The previous site wasnt really using much of the tools that WordPress provides but it was still subject to the various hacks and security risks that came with using the popular blogging platform.

New Technician Pool is available

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:33:46 +1000

I have added the latest Technician question pool to the newer version of the test prep site. This comes into effect for exams taken on or after July 1st, 2022. I will take down the old question pool from both this site and the new site on June 30th and from then on the new site will be where you can find the practice exams.

Please let me know if you have purchased access to the current Technician exam pool to get custom exams and results tracking but it is possible you will take your exam after July 1st, 2022, please let me know so I can update your access to include the new pool.

Extra

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

The FCC Extra Exam (Element 4) consists of 50 questions, you are required to get over 74% (37 out of 50) for a passing grade. There are ten subelements, E0-E9, and the full exam consists of questions from each subelement (and from each of the topic groups within each subelement).

Current Question Pool: 602 Questions, Effective July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2028

Extra Exam Subelements

The Extra exam has questions that cover the following topics (subelements)

Morse Code Symbols and Sounds

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

The popular view of Morse code (aka CW, Continuous Wave) as a collection of dots and dashes is the first thing to forget when trying to learn morse code! For this reason, you will not find the usual table of letters and their corresponding dot/dash equivalents. What you will see is a table of the letters and their sound equivalents.

It is far better to learn to associate a letter with a sound from the beginning, rather than trying to translate the sound into a letter via dots and dashes. The table below shows the sounds for the letters, numbers, punctuation and some of the common procedural signals often used in amateur radio contacts.

So you want to learn Morse Code

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 12:33:46 +1000

Forget Frustration: Gain Valuable Morse Skills And Increase Your Amateur-Radio Pleasure

Note: For complete information on Morse Code training, CW operating, Morse Code history, and more, see the author’s book, Morse Code: Breaking the Barrier, published by MFJ Enterprises, Inc.

Amateur license restructuring is here. You no longer need to pass a 13- or 20-word-per-minute (wpm) test to gain full operating privileges. Passing a 5-wpm test gets you everything. However, there are good reasons why you should do more than that. Having a level of Morse proficiency that is of real use on the air, meaning that you can copy at 12-13 wpm or more, will add immeasurably to your enjoyment of Amateur Radio.

Ham Morse Version 1.492 now available

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 12:33:46 +1000

Version 1.492 of the Ham Morse iOS application was released on the App Store a few days ago. This was mostly a maintenance release to address a few bugs and other issues that had cropped up. However, it also included a more significant change to the app configuration - the app audio now plays regardless of the device’s Silent Mode setting! This has been causing issues for ages where it looks the app is playing but there is no audio so I’m very hopefull this will fix those issues once and for all.

Callsigns and Replay options added to Morse Generator

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:33:46 +1000

Replay option - You can now replay a passage of practice text in the Morse Code Generator. When the code for a particular passage of text has finished playing, the play button will change to a ‘Replay’ option that will allow you to listen to the same passage of text again. The Play button now has the following states:

Play - Initial setting, click to play the generated practice text.
Pause - Pause the morse audio
Continue - Unpause the morse audio
Replay - Replay morse for the current text from the start.

Callsigns - I have added back in the Callsign option so you can practice copying callsigns in the code generator. It will generate standard US callsigns like AA9PW as well as prefixes indicating an operator is outside of their normal region, AA9PW/0

Bug fix for Ham Morse now available

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 12:33:46 +1000

Version 1.490 of the Ham Morse iOS application was released on the App Store today (July 15th, 2022). This was a maintenance release to fix a bug present in v1.480 related to iPhones with a specific screen size (12/13 minis, 11 pro, X and XS).

Technical bugs

Fixed a UI layout bug for iPhones with screens height of 812 points. This was causing the app to crash on launch on those particular devices because it couldnt find an appropriate UI description for that screen size.

Ham Morse Version 1.480 now available

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 12:33:46 +1000

Version 1.480 of the Ham Morse iOS application was released on the App Store yesterday. This was mostly a maintenance release to address a few bugs and other issues that had cropped up.

App Features

Added support for larger iPhone screens.
Updated or removed RSS news feeds which were no longer working.
Updated the support URL.
Reorganized the iPad screen layout slightly.

Technical bugs

Fixed a thread-related bug that would cause the app to crash if you pressed one of the morse content buttons while the app was playing.
Implemented autolayout on the iPad UI XIB to support various screen sizes using a single XIB file. I was unable to get horizontal layout to work consistently so that is still not available.

Morse QSO option now back online

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:33:46 +1000

I have fixed the Morse Code Generator to bring the QSO option back online. It will now create a part of a simulated CW conversation (QSOs) that will give you practice copying many of the usual elements of a basic morse code conversation: callsigns, names, places, weather, rigs and antenna, power, etc.

An example of a generated QSO is shown below.

kd9otp de ku9vyw = ge, tu for call = ur rst 475 = name here is harold = location hr is greensburg, indiana = here, the weather is snowing = I have a ic781 = the ant is a 3 el yagi sending out 350 watts = i work as a driver = ive been a ham fer 54 years = back to you kd9otp de ku9vyw kn ar =

About

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:01:34 +0700

Welcome to the AA9PW amateur exam practice website. It is built and maintained by me, Simon Twigger, aka AA9PW. This site has been through a variety of incarnations since I first put it on line in 1996. I used it as a way to teach myself Perl programming and web development while I was doing a postdoc fellowship in Biochemistry. The site was originally hosted courtesy of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Biochemistry department until I registered AA9PW.com around 1999.

Ham Morse iOS App Support

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the support page for the Ham Morse iOS application. Your feedback on the app and how its working (or if its not working!) are really important so there are a few ways you can get in touch.

Using the Disqus comment feature below
Via our Facebook Page
Via direct email to simont at aa9pw.com

I will endeavour to get back to you as soon as I can to help address any issues that you may be having.

Ham Morse Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ham Morse Privacy Policy

Summary

We do not directly gather any personal data such as e-mails, first or last names, phone numbers or mailing addresses. However, we do utilize Flurry Analytics in order to collect some user data related to how the app is used. Flurry tracks which features are popular and which features are less well used, it also helps with crash reporting so we can identify and fix bugs more effectively. The data is only available in an anonymized form, it can not be tracked back to a specific user or device. For more information on Flurry and your options for managing yoyur data please see Flurry’s Privacy Policy and opt-out link, below.

Ham Morse Release Notes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

New Features in v1.492

Audio is no longer muted when the device is in Silent Mode. 🎉
Clear button is deactivated while the morse is playing, but it is now reactivated once the morse is finished to make it easier to reset the text and start a new practice session.
Fixed bug related to the News option where devices were crashing when News was selected.

New Features in v1.490

Bug fix to address crashes seen on certain iPhone models with specific screen dimensions.

New Features in v1.485

Added support for larger iPhone screen sizes, e.g. iPhone 13 Max
Updated RSS feeds to remove ones that were no longer working
Small changes to the UI for the iPad

New features in v1.450:

Added a number of common accented letters (å ä ch è é ö and ü) to better support our European morse enthusiasts
Modified the available audio tone to go down to 220Hz, research has show that using tones in the 250-300Hz range can improve the ability to copy morse code in noisy signal conditions. For more information see LA3ZA’s Studies on morse code recognition
Added the ability to vary the text block length when copying random blocks of characters (e.g. letters, numbers, etc). This varies the length of the blocks of characters in a more natural way so they are not always 5 characters long
iPhone 5 and Retina support to make use of the larger screen size in the iPhone5 and later models.