My guess is this applies to reading words on the page / screen and not when hearing a ‘word’ as a sequence of sounds (e.g. Morse code) representing the letters, which either has to recognized as a unique sound or or whose letters have to be assembled into the word.
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I am touched to read Guru’s entry and his familiar way of telling about himself.
73 Chris
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The answer to this question in my opinion, is to teach yourself to read behind what is being sent - two, three or four characters behind. It takes many hours of practice though. Being able to retain the characters in your head helps you to form the words within your mind. You can then either write the word down if you need to, while taking in subconciously the next few incoming characters at the same time, or you can copy them in your head if it isn’t necessary to record them by pen or keyboard.
One way you can get better at this is by taking part in CW contests, taking the short exchanges in contests becomes effortless eventually, but you need to do 100s of hours doing that to really master the art of what you are asking about. To run in the big contests and hold a frequency you also need to have a half decent station. For search and pounce its more a case of patience. and if the stations are too fast for you to copy stay with them until you have the ops full callsign - you may have to listen to a few exchanges to get it in full, but it is all practice, practice, practice.
To start with, try this method related to SOTA activating if you are able to. Call CQ SOTA using CW, memorise the callsign of the station of interest who is calling you amongst the throng, don’t record it at that point, try to retain the call in your mind. Go back to that station using your key. While the station is responding to you THEN write their callsign in your log, not before. Finally, send your TU or 73 either by hand or with your memory keyer. When you can manage that every QSO without pregnant pauses, you will know you are going places and from then on, you should find operating CW effortless. If the pile up is intense, just sit listening until you get a full call or at least a partial call and then go back to the station of interest with a full call, or a partial call response e.g. HB9? HB9? 599 BK. I can only give you my take on how I came to learn the Morse and get reasonably good at it. Other people have their own methods, all I know is what worked for me. I’m self taught, through amateur radio operating and contesting. I started learning when I was 29, got my licence and went straight into CW rather than putting the key away in the drawer like many did in those days, when you needed a 12 WPM pass at a coastal station before you could go on HF. It took about 5 years from that point and 100s if not 1000s of hours of CW to get to a good level - by good level I mean taking plain language and numbers at 25 WPM with 100% accuracy. I enjoyed listening to Morse so much I was able to find a job in that line of work. So I finished up working in an environment where I was copying Morse for up to 8 hours a day and being paid for doing it, you probably couldn’t do that in the 21st century, but from the 1920s up to the early 1990s you still could and I was one of the tail enders who did it. Prior to my change of job, as an amateur in my 30s during the 1980s, I think the longest period I put in during a CQWW CW contest was around 36 hours of CW in a 48 hour period over a weekend contest. I did a lot of contesting from 1982 through to 2005, and then SOTA came along!
73 Phil G4OBK
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The reason you can copy the most common 1000 words at 27wpm and not ARRL practice files, or indeed anything else at 27wpm is probably quite simple. 
You have spent the time learning the most common words. You know what to expect and you have become familiar with the most frequent words & letters used in English. Similarily its often obvious that many operators in CW can have quick exchanges of wx, rst, qth, name and so on, but the minute you veer off the expected exchange and quite a few get confused. 
There’s a further problem in learning the 100, 1000 or 100000 most common words in the English language is they do not all occur in sentences used on the air.
What you might find helpful is to familiarise yourself - (learn) ALL the letters, numbers & punctuation at the same rate, frequency and speed. That way if you hear an X you’ll write an X as fast as if someone sent you an E, or I or O etc., I believe an app called “morse runner” ? can do callsigns at any speed. Try practicing reading those at increasing speeds until you get to the speed you wish.
The way around this is to learn to read letters/numbers/punctuation etc., in any order and any speed you wish. The way I learned and all the other military & commercial operators learned was to learn random letters of the alphabet etc., we also used foreign language tapes, random 5 letter groups, mixed punctuation & numbers and so on. That way you were not guessing anything and you knew if you heard, dedahdedahdedah you wrote a full stop as quick as you’d write an ‘E’ if you heard ‘dit’. If its any help, I used to know and use all the accented/Amuluts? letters - é ö á ñ and so on. Its 50 years since I had to read those. If I hear one now in a QSO in, say German, it takes me longer than normal to recall what it was. I don’t practice those letters anymore -(I dont’ need to 
)
As for ‘head copy’, I think thats simply something which comes from familiarity with morse. I spent a lot of time writing stuff down because that was my job. Head copy if fine. But it does require the ability to ‘hold’, or juggle, or place the letters you hear - in your head in the order they were sent until you visualise the whole word. (some people do this differently, I do it visually in my head). And I think that again is something that just comes with practice. I would very much doubt that when I, or any one else was learning morse that any of us could ‘head-copy’. We were too busy learning to read morse and get it down on paper before we forgot!!!
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Hi all,
Pity the military ops who must accurately copy 5 letter groups; different ball game!
Ken
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Usually machine sent regimented Morse though - so no guessing. Code groups are much easier than taking hand sent plain language Morse in whatever language. What is harder is what we called CYCO in the trade. Five character groups being a mixture of letters and numbers. If you were copy accurately at 28-32 wpm plain language or 5 letter groups if it was 5 character cyco being sent then you would probably not retain your accuracy level at much over 25 WPM!
73 Phil G4OBK
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Re Very high speed Morse.
I had a relative who with a group of friends used to QSO at 80 wpm. Keyboard typing for Tx and ear for Rx. He was considered a bit odd by other family members. I was in awe.
Just like to point out that for EME, the ultimate weak signal mode, around 12 wpm is preferred.
73
Ron
VK3AFW
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Indeed! Was that CYCO or psycho?
When calling an unfamiliar station, usually send about 15 WPM, and Farrnsworth it down to about 5, with BIG spacing, because my call is not easy for some ops.
Ken
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Yes, 12-15wpm. Too fast and the dits disappear into the QSB etc. Too slow and you die of boredom 
My now SK friend Dave G3UFO, was a ship’s radio officer for a long time. When you asked him he always said he operated at 15-18wpm WITH NO REPEATS NEEDED. i.e. he sent it accurately just once. The shore station could copy it with ease (QSB and QRM excepted)
It sort-of just happens. With some callsigns I no longer hear the characters just there is Morse then a call magically appears in my log. e.g. DL1FU, OK2PDT, HB9AGH, F5JKK, F4WBN, SA4BLM, HB9CBR. All those people have damn fine fists. If you are not in that list don’t worry, there are many of you, those just sprang to mind now.
I can’t rag chew, just get calls and reports and S2S refs. Sure in what’s being sent there’ll be “GA ANDY” “TKS SOTA” etc. etc. and those just appear in my head, but there’s always so much happening that once I have the call and report my brain switches off and then suddenly I’m aware “hey what was he asking me?” in that over.
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Thanks for all the advice
I started my learning with the iz2uuf app, and built up to 6 character random grouos including numbers and punctuation…but this was by typing rather than head copy.
Perhaps i will put these random character groups back into my practice, but this time use head copy.
My goal is to ragchew easily at 25wpm. (and of course, SOTA exchanges)
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Hello Matthew,
You are doing all the right things and most importantly getting on the air regularly. I’ve heard you outside of SOTA many times and your CW sending is well spaced, easy head copy so keep up the good work!
This is my goal as well. I hit a bit of a wall last Autumn (copying short exchanges up to nearly 30wpm, having rag chew QSOs around 22wpm) but found that the rag chews were quite difficult for me. I realised that whilst my instant character recognition was good (and some words) there were other skills that I needed that were not as advanced. For me, the biggest one was head sending once off the standard QSO template. I found composing what I wanted to send whilst sending the previous sentence messed with my sending on the paddles big time.
Luckily for me I found another route that has been helping me - I have backed off a bit from the ‘race for speed’ and got into straight key sending. I found my brain didn’t need to use as much energy sending with a straight key, for me I just think of the word and it seems to come out of the straight key with no effort. This has allowed me to really enjoy rag chew QSOs and brush up on those mental skills required to think and send at the same time.
The straight key has obviously restricted my speed to 16-17 max if I want to keep the timing accurate, but I have now taken a bit of a leap of faith and bought a nice bug which I’m also finding works for me and will allow the speed to gradually ramp up. The other day I had one of my most rewarding QSOs so far - a half hour back and forth chat without all the ‘wx hr is’ template stuff. This was still back at 18wpm, but the sense of being able to have a free and easy conversation without writing anything down was exactly what I’ve been dreaming of 
.
So keep on doing what you are doing - your progress shows its working for you - but do have a think about the other skills you need to reach that target and give them chance to develop as well.
Look forward to a nice CW chat again before too long,
73 Jonathan
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Practice definitely helps, as of course it should!
As per usual, I’ve been trying my best to gather as much winter bonus as possible. The EA2IF memorial events have further spurred me on, trying to earn tickets for the key raffle.
I’ve seen my CW reading make an marked improvement in the past month or so. I usually only operate for SOTA activations, so I have long breaks between on air sessions.
Yesterday I put up a 17m - 6m dipole in my tiny garden, with a hope of catching one of the EG#GURU stations. My noise level is very high but I did manage to get Ignacio EA2BD operating EG2GURU/P on 20m. I used a beat up MFJ manual tuner, which somebody had given me for parts years ago, but I had fixed, to get a signal out on 20m from a 17m dipole!
I put out a few CQ calls for fun on 17m and I worked a couple of stations, both came back faster than I was sending but I was able to head copy everything. One guy told me he was using an FTdx5000 - that wasn’t something I was expecting but I copied it.
I just wish I had a permanent station with reasonable noise level, I’d love to do the one QSO a day challenge.
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This has become a very interesting thread - so many good points being made.
I’ve found this on many occasions. If I add in some little ‘non standard’ comment, I never get a response about it leaving me to wonder if the chaser didn’t follow those words in Morse, wasn’t interested, or wanted to keep the QSO short. So, I don’t do it any more unless I know the operator personally.
I’ve used MorseRunner a lot (and sometimes RufzXP) to increase my Rx speed but [like many PC-based apps] it makes you use the keyboard so it can measure your progress. I use pencil and paper logging for SOTA and anything that departs from that process is not helpful.
I wonder if the military (including special forces) use Morse code any more, although judging by the French Morse station FAV22, some still probably train for using it. Reading the Bravo Two Zero story about the SAS mission gone wrong in the first Gulf War, it didn’t seem to be a backup even back then.
Wise words Andy especially when I’m sitting on a windy hilltop with the tarp noise and other distractions and suffering from brain freeze due to the cold. It’s better to match - or come close at least - to the activator’s sending speed. I am more likely to copy the chaser’s callsign the first time if around my sending speed rather than sent 2-3 times but much quicker. Please remember we’ve not sitting in a warm quiet comfortable shack.
SOTA isn’t like a contest so while I want to improve my receiving speed a bit, say ~25 wpm, I think it’s diminishing returns beyond that.
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This! 
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No pity needed tks.
They are much easier than you might expect. 
Why? You know they are going to be 5 letters long. They are not going to contain awkward combinations of letters and numbers such as multiple fractions ie 105 tons DF88; 3 X PN832A9: 9 X5-1/2, TKØ1LB (13b)…and so on.
Nor is it going to contain what must be one of the most difficult plain language words to receive in CW… Mississippi… 
myself and 3 other friends doing an RSGB test at for a bit of fun whilst in the RN failed to copy that one word at 25wpm because the text contained that one word!!! 
We were all capable at reading groups at 30wpm with 100% accuracy!!!
Also the most common letters in English and some other languages is E, I S H T A U N D = it is no coincidence that those are also quite short morse characters so in plain language you get more letters than you would if you had to read XXFYI RWQY LMORE PZWQU etc., etc., in the same period of time.
So sitting down to groups was just like writing or typing out letters as someone calls them out.
Dave Ex RN RO 
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I’m sure I won’t be the only one to say that one day I can receive and send perfectly at 25wpm and some days I can barely muster a 5wpm callsign
Recent Seatallan activation is an example. Fine for 20 minutes then nearly launched the rig off the edge when it all went to pot.
My favourite toy is the Morserino. It has a good echo function. Listen then send what you heard. It is very pedantic so it marks you down if you don’t send well.
Regular skeds worked for me, at least twice a week plus additional practice. I did the CW Academy advanced last summer with 3 others. We practised things like ‘going to the shops’ I’d send something I might buy, the next person sent what I had sent then added in a new item, the next person added another and so on. Nothing was written down. It was an excellent exercise for confidence and recall. Other exercises were conversations without the camera on, just like on air but without all that pesky RF. The aim was to converse at 25wpm.
You’ve progressed really quickly Matthew. The next bits may take a bit longer to master but keep at it.
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As a Chaser it seems like it on a Saturday and Sunday! (But only if you want it to be).
73 Phil G4OBK
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Chasing CW SOTA is harder than S&P in a CW contest. Activating CW SOTA is easier than running in a CW contest.
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The best RSGB CW contest for testing your receive accuracy is what used to be called the ROPOCO Contest. I think the event is no longer in the Contest Calendar, which is a shame. II last took part around 2005.
The winner of the contest was the station with the highest score with no errors. The exchange consisted of a signal report and your own postcode for your first contact. For subsequent contacts you were required to send the postcode that you last received. Usually by the end of the contest (I think it was a two hour event) your postcode would come back to you from one of your later contacts. It wasn’t always the same postcode as what you originally sent! It was great fun and I took part in it for a number of years. The contacts got cross checked by an adjudicator for errors in receiving. Shame its gone as I would have give it another go.
There are plenty of RSGB Club Contests though for anyone dipping their toe into the CW contesting world. I’m hoping that my local club in Scarborough field a team in CW NFD first weekend in June that I can be part of. I know we have a site lined up on the coast, not a listed summit unfortunately.
73 Phil
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Me and @ON7DQ Luc have been testing out our back up HB-1B QRP SOTA radios this last week. I just plugged mine up - it hasn’t been used for some years. I still gives me 4 watts output on 7 MHz from a small 18650 power pack giving 12.7 volts output.
I just had a QSO with @HB9EVF Tom on HB/AG-001 running 3 watts to my OCFD 80m dipole - that’s as much power as I can get on 20m… he came back first call. I couldn’t be bothered plugging into my Hexbeam.
I want to check out the HB-1B with a few more contacts on all four bands, so here are a few sked times and freqs for later today when I will call CQ at around 18 WPM. Give me a call please if you can hear me, for a bit of Morse practice if you wish:
10.120 MHz 1430z ALL ± 1 KHz
14.060 MHz 1530z
7.030 MHz 1600z
3.560 MHz 1900z
73 Phil G4OBK
PS SWL reports on this reflector are welcome!
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