The tried and tested method taught to most professional operators I’ve come across is pretty simple - with a few caveats:=
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I would NOT suggest using standard SOTA or the rubber stamp type QSOs you hear on the air. Unless thats all you intend ever to do you’ll trip up the minute someone goes ‘off script’ or sends you something you were not expecting.
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Practicing random English words/sentences etc., is fine. But doing so encourages you to guess what the next word is. And thats an error which will throw you off.
Use foreign language texts and random groups. (I guess random ham callsigns will do at a pinch. That way you’ll learn to read morse - any morse.
I wouldn’t use Farnsworth either. Its rarely heard ion the air.
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So start off using an overall speed (character & overall speed the same), until you are comfortable and achieve decent accuracy at that speed - say over 85%. Yes you’ll have to mark your own work, but guessing your accuracy will probably do. Once you are comfortable reading that morse at that speed, then increase the speed you are practicing on by 1 or 2 wpm. Repeat and keep practicing until you are comfortable at that new speed and your accuracy has increased - say of 85% again, and simply repeat until you’ve reached a speed you.
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‘Head copy’ of plain language will simply happen once you’ve got comfortable receiving morse at your chosen target speed. Forget trying to do ‘Instant Character Recognition’ or ‘copying behind’. Both of these will happen and get better, anyway as you progress.
Many apps, such as Morse Runner, does random letters, random callsigns as do other apps, but I have never really used many so you’ll just have to search around the many apps.
LEARNING TO SEND GOOD MORSE
Almost every morse operator thinks their morse is good. But how do you know what your morse sounds like to others?. You cannot judge what your morse sounds like - only someone else can. You might think you are sending perfectly formed letters with correct spacing and correctly separated words but that is because you know what you thought you were sending.
To improve, you need to hear what your morse sounds like to others.
There are many apps that can read (good) morse but none will tell what you need to do to improve. Unless you know someone who will be able to give you feedback and constructive criticism I’d suggest the following method:-
Using your phone or some other device to record, play/send some of your morse and play it back so you can hear what you’ve sent. That works, sort of, except you are likely to remember or know what you were sending, so you won’t be able to judge the quality very well because you will have a built in bias and know what you were meant to be sending.
There are a couple of ways of avoiding this:-
Send random groups of letters or morse characters. Then playback what you sent and see if it matches what the groups/characters were.
Find some 'foreign language text and use that.
Or… if you can only find plain old English to send then wait until you’ve forgotten what you sent before playing it back to yourself… Sending English text backwards works much better. IE retteb hcum skrow sdrawkck…
Find a friend who does morse (on or off air) And get them to give you accurate/honest feedback.
Concentrate on reading morse…Thats listening to it and not reading about it.
Learning morse isn’t rocket science and you don’t need a degree - but you DO need to put time in. A few minutes a day is not enough AND you will benefit from feedback from good, competent operators. ~Not necessarily from others who are also learning.
- Dave Perry's logbook: Learning Morse in the Royal Navy
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