Well the latest amature itch that needs scratching is to give learning CW some serious head space.
Any pointers people who have gone down this rabbit hole have learnt?
I guess the main question I have is straight of paddle key? my understanding is straight you make the . / - while with a paddle left or right makes the appropriate . / -
Cheers
John
Come join the dark side!
Personally I highly recommend Morse Mania on Android (it may be on iOS too). Also try Morse Walker in a Web browser.
Keep listening and keep practising. It will come to you and will suddenly click. Also, donât panic about sending nothing but perfect code. My fist is atrocious but I keep trying and I get the job done.
Get on the air when you can send and receive at a pace that suits YOU. Good operators will QRS for you. Take your time and donât panic!
I started off as pure SSB. These days I rarely operate on HF SSB, it is all CW. I have developed a massive passion for CW which I didnât quite expect as I had zero interest in it at all.
The same may happen to you!
Oh and p.s., collecting and/or making 3D printed keys is super addictive!
72!
It is easy and it then becomes hard again.
GL with it. Takes much persistence !
Hi John,
There is already a plethora of great advice on the reflector.
A search on here will provide you with a good amount of existing posts with some great recommendations and paths people have taken in learning morse.
A recent post, less than a week ago for instance covered Android apps.
As someone who is about 5 months into their CW learning journey. I have ALOT of thoughts on how to learn. Sorry for the long post but here are my thoughts on how to learn CW - Join CW Academy or the Long Island CW Club (LICW), you will NOT regret it.
CW Academy is a great choice if you are serious about learning CW and want a more structured, mentored approach.
The biggest difference with CW Academy is that it is faster-paced and more formal. Classes start on a set schedule, so you usually have to sign up and wait for the next session to begin. Once class starts, you meet twice a week, have more homework, and get much more one-on-one attention from the advisor.
You are more closely mentored and watched compared to some other learning options, which can be a good thing if you want accountability and feedback.
The beginner class starts at 25 WPM character speed with a slower Farnsworth/effective speed, around 6 WPM. That may sound intimidating at first, but the idea is to learn the sound of each character instead of counting dits and dahs.
CW Academy is also 100% free.
Knowing most of my letters before starting CW Academy helped a lot. If I had started CW Academy without already knowing some letters, it would have been much harder.
Overall, I would recommend CW Academy above anything else if you are willing to wait for classes to start, can handle a set schedule, and are okay with more homework and a faster pace.
Long Island CW Club, or LICW, is also excellent, especially for getting started.
One of the best things about LICW is the carousel system. You can start and stop anytime, and if a class feels too easy or too hard, you can simply find another class that fits you better. That makes it much easier to jump in without waiting for a specific class cycle to begin.
LICW felt more like a relaxed check-in style class to me. There is not nearly the same amount of one-on-one time as CW Academy, and the overall pace is slower. That can be a big advantage if you want something less stressful and more flexible.
LICW starts around 12 WPM character speed with about 8 WPM Farnsworth/effective speed. There is a small yearly membership fee.
I learned most of my letters through LICW, and I have nothing bad to say about it. It is a wonderful resource and a great place to start. For me personally, though, I eventually wanted something a little more intense and structured, which is why I really liked CW Academy.
If you want the easiest way to get started, I would start with LICW.
If you want more structure, more accountability, more homework, and more direct mentoring, I would recommend CW Academy.
My personal ideal path would be:
Start with LICW to learn the letters and get comfortable hearing CW, then move into CW Academy when you are ready for a more serious and faster-paced class.
LICW is great, but it is more relaxed than what I eventually wanted. CW Academy was harder, but I really liked the one-on-one attention and the structured pace.
I found it easier to start on the WARC bands where you are less likely to get a pileup that you arenât yet ready to handle. I always post my spots with a comment for chasers to use big spaces. Donât wait until you feel comfortable to get on the air. I feel awkwardly nervous and anxious every time still before calling CQ but you just have to jump in. CW is wickedly difficult (for me at least) but thereâs a certain satisfaction after completing an activation that keeps me motivated to keep progressing. Be patient with yourself and celebrate the little breakthroughs as they happen.
73, Jared, N7MAW
Yay, welcome to the dark side.
I started learning CW in January 2025 specifically for SOTA. Iâve used CW regularly on activations since June 2025, and I have progressed to my current receiving speed of 24 wpm in September.
I used lcwo.net with a blend of koch method lessons and MorseMachine. Later I added word training and callsign training to the mix. I started at 15 wpm, which is a lower speed than the default for beginners. I am still using the website almost daily to keep my receiving skills up. You can see my profile here: https://lcwo.net/profile/zjosua.
In addition, I found it very helpful to practice sending some frequent words and callsigns. This is also beneficial to me as a kind of receiving training, as I obviously hear the words I send. I have bought an OpenCWKeyer for this, but you can also use a radio in training mode.
I have also used the MorseMania app, but for me it was not nearly as helpful as lcwo.net.
I am now very confident in using CW for SOTA and POTA, but I could not hold a conversation in CW. The problem is, that I almost exclusively train receiving characters, not words. And 24 wpm is just too fast to hear individual characters and string them together to words in real time.
I can receive frequently used words of SOTA and POTA exchanges just fine, especially the ones I usually send myself.
Beckyâs CW practice messages on youtube are quite helpful to learn receiving conversational CW, but they are at a much lower speed than I operate at.
I have also bought a lifetime membership at Long Island CW Club to join some classes where they practice CW conversations, but so far I havenât gotten around to attend a class.
I think the problem is that i lack the motivation to get ragchew-level proficiency in CW, because I never use a radio outside of SOTA activations.
I wish you the best of luck on your CW journey.
Regards
Yoshi
Yes, with a straight key you set the timing of the dits and dahs yourself. With an iambic paddle, you use your index finger for dahs and your thumb for dits.
I recommend starting at 15 wpm (I know many people will jump at my throat for saying this), but itâs the only way to avoid getting stuck at low speeds in the future. Donât worry if at first you donât understand anything â just learn the âmusicâ of each character, and later youâll catch it by context.
The downside of learning Morse at low speeds is that in most cases you start doing mental calculations to decode the character, and by the time youâve figured it out, the other station is already five characters ahead.
Forget about words and practice with random characters.
Before writing (except for names, QTH, reportsâŚ), itâs better to decode everything mentally.
And when â hopefully very soon â you start operating in CW and canât copy someone whoâs sending faster than you, send âPSE QRSâ. Never forget the âPSEâ, because otherwise it would sound like an order.
Good luck in your new adventure!
73 de JP3PPL
That really is a question that can, indeed should, be deferred until youâre able to read Morse code reasonably well. At the moment you donât know what properly formed Morse code sounds like, so it is quite pointless trying to send it.
FWIW, I would, if I were starting now rather than 60 years ago, go straight to paddles once I could read Morse. With the Morse test requirement, which did require basic proficiency with a straight key, long gone there is no longer a need to master that particular skill!
There are numerous threads here on the SOTA Reflector about learning Morse code.
Good luck! It really is worth the effort.
73, John, G3WGV
My suggestion is to have someone to learn it with. Do you have a licensed friend who doesnât understand morse and might be persuaded to learn? Learning morse in parallel with someone else certainly helps⌠I speak from experience. As well as mutual support a bit of friendly rivalry goes a long way.
As John says, forget about sending morse until you can confidentally read around 12 words a minute. Trying earlier may actually hold you back. Sending is so much easier than receiving as you know the message beforehand.
All the best with this. It is certainly well worthwhile.
73, Gerald
I set myself a new years challenge back on 2025 to learn CW from nothing. I wanted to do it alone, at my own pace. Iâm now OK and can activate a summit/park unaided at 20-25wpm. Hereâs what I did.
Learn the code - you need to know it by heart - the proâs call it ICR (instant character recognition). That means mapping the sound to a letter without any thinking in between. I did that using MorseMania (Android and iPhone) and I spent 15 minutes per day on it, every day, before bed when I was relaxed. Just do it. Every night. Some days are better than others, but every day, consistency. The other thing to note is youâre learning the sound. Do not fall into the trap of counting dots and dashes, so set the speed fast (I used 30 WPM character speed) so you donât end up counting.
Use online tools & simulators - these can simulate real QSOs, etc. I use morsewalker.com (present tense, Iâm still learning) a lot. It will have simple QSOs with you. These are great for practice as theyâre consistent and infinitely patient; but in real life, OPs are more kind that the computer simulators (real humans will slow down or add big gaps if they sense youâre struggling, and send their calls many times, where as the computer wonât). There are many of these tools. I made one to drill me with known callsigns (I found that âfakeâ callsigns threw me), so used SPC database to give me real callsigns: M1GEO - CW Morse Code Practice Engine.
Practice sending - You can also get cheap adapters to practice sending - I made one here: M1GEO - An easy-to-build interface for Morse Paddles & Keys. This works well with morseinvaders.com (emphasizes speed and accuracy of sending) and other things like didahdit.com (practice sending/receiving known callsigns).
Use YouTube activation recordings - this is where I really found I improved. I spent 15 minutes per day logging for @K4SWL (https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasK4SWL) or @N4BKY & @N4FFF (https://www.youtube.com/@HamRadioDuo) but youâll find someone you like; search Youtube for âSOTA CW activationâ and there will be many. Listen and follow along. Youâll go from getting the odd part of a callsign, to thinking âI got all of thatâ to âI wanna do thatâ
There are many tools and things around online to help; just get stuck in.
George M1GEO.
This really is the key, if youâll pardon the pun. 15 minutes every day is immeasurably better than the same cumulative time spent once a week. The way the professionals did it was total immersion, several hours every single day and that got results fast. If you can stretch to 30 minutes every day so much the better. And yes, there will be periods of time, or off days when youâll feel like you arenât making any progress but in reality you are and suddenly it will click.
There is, sadly, no short cut to learning to receive Morse. Training programs, simulators, etc. can help but at the end of the day itâs all about getting your brain wrapped around the code. That takes time and continuous exposure.
Absolutely. 15m was the minimum.
I would often use a target of 50 QSOs on MorseWalker. However long that took me.
Iâm a nerd, so I then copied the log from each session, and then over time had a bulk of them which I used ChatGPT to suggest weaker characters, things to try. This was useful.
morsecode.world was also very useful once I knew my problem characters to drill those more frequently.
I went from disliking morse as a class B licence (morse kept me off of HF aged 13 or so) to really enjoying it!
Good luck.
George. M1GEO.
My own journey with Morse took many years. I initially learnt it with a friend, John, M0CAN. I used to cycle to Johnâs house and weâd use his FT736R on 2FM with an oscillator on a slow Morse net. John took his test first and âupgradedâ (this was late 90âs) from his G7 call. I had additional input from Jack Birse, G4ZVD, who was a keen IOSA chaser and sometime activator. I was egged on to do a Morse test at a radio rally on 14th February 1999, the idea was just to see what a test would be like and to get familiar with it to avoid some of the nerves when I did it for real. I was a nervous teen but somehow, quite unexpectedly, I walked out with a 12wpm Morse test pass!
I wasnât very active for years, I managed only a handful of Morse QSOs from the Keighley Amateur Radio Society shack.
I then got interested in the SOTA LA1KHA PP3 Challenge and I pushed myself to get going with Morse. My first activations were at around 10wpm, but I built up speed fairly quickly. Iâm very much programmed for SOTA QSOs, Iâm not so good at rag chewing but I can just about manage a typical short QSO. (Name, QTH, WX, Rig, Ant etc).
The more Morse you do, the better you get.
Occasionally I amuse myself with Morsle, itâs a bit like the popular Wordle puzzle, where you get so many tries to guess a word. https://morsle.fun/
73, Colin
Donât bother even start to learn to send until you can at least read morse at a decent speed. You canât imitate something you canât read.
And to add to this, to do pileup training (you will get them), have look at MorseRunner (Windows, or webbased). You can set a bunch of parameters to simulate propagation. Pick an easy contest like the CQWW with a simple exchange and train 15min/day.
73, Martin - PE1EEC
I figure Iâm an outlier on the âease of learning Morseâ distribution. There were no Morse classes I could attend so learning mostly alone was the only option available to me. I tried following the conventional wisdom of the time as best I could distill it, and that inevitably involved the method pretty much everybody seemed to swear by at the time.
Two years of 15-20 minutes a day (most days) and I was still nowhere useful.
My workbooks from the time contain pages and pages of random characters, but only 15 or 16 different characters at most. Would the whole process have worked differently if Iâd started half a century or more ago? Possibly, but I was the well-aged side of fifty before I started. I ended up having to swear at pretty much everything most folks seemed to swear by. Things that made a real positive difference for me (the outlier in the distribution):
Find a comfortable pitch to work with. Turned out being under 500 Hz made a huge difference. Iâve no idea why, but it may be an âold earsâ issue; if I get a ringing in my ears it often has a strong component around 600 Hz, and perhaps that makes any frequency around there something of an annoyance. (This also means that most online Morse recordings are sub-optimal for me. In order to complete the CWOps course I took a few years back I had to apply a pitch shift to every audio file they provided.)
Learn ABCâŚXYZ 123âŚ890 and a few others all together in predictable sequences, pretty much the way I first learned to read. No trying to learn N characters to âbetter than 95%â level before adding the next character, because every time I added the next character I was back to square zero with the previous N.
Listen to stuff thatâs actually interesting to listen to. My attention span for random characters is essentially zilch. Even number groups are stretching it. Plain text or actual QSOs, however, work a lot better. Martyn G3UKVâs mixed-mode GB2CW broadcasts helped keep me going from week to week.
Ignore the âstraight key firstâ bunch, and start with a paddle. Straight keying aggravated old mouse-clicking repetitive strain issues, whilst using a paddle didnât. TBH a side-swiper would probably have done fine, too, but a paddle was what I got.
Learn sending and receiving in tandem. Listen to characters, then send them back, pretty much like copying letters in writing lessons at school. Easier with a paddle as the keyerâs doing the element forming.
I doubt Iâll ever be a fluent 20wpm+ rag chewer. I generally get by chasing and activating SOTA, POTA (and even IOTA and the occasional holiday DX station) though.
How just about every professional operator learned morse. No time wasting fancy ideas, no Koch this and Farnsworth that. No Instant Chsracter recognition or whatever.
Just practice reading morse. Not some morse - all morse!
Most importantly put the time in. 5â 10â. ? At least 20 minutes a day.
Progress is almost 100% related to time spent listening to morse.
The bottom line is that there are NO shortcuts. 
